Midnight
by ipacacdoll
Summary: Snapshots at midnight. M/D
1. Chapter 1: Faith,Hope and Love

"Derek broke up with me today

"_Derek broke up with me today." _ Was all Meredith could think miserably as she sat in the chair in her bedroom, looking at the digital clock on her side of the bed, casting an eery red glow on the empty room. It was 11.58. Only two more minutes of the day that to date, could have been the most devastating of her life. At five am this morning- she had hope- hope that Derek would really pick her, choose her, love her. That he would want to share the last piece of cheesecake with her. But… Bonnie died, and so did their love story. Eleven years of marriage with a wife that cheated on him with his best friend trumped the prefect last two months with her. And that felt like a metaphorical pole through her body.

"_Take it on faith." _ He had told her at the trailer. Take the rest of it on faith, learn as we go along- he made it sound as if he was thinking long term. As if they would have months together- and they only had a few days. She trusted him, and that faith was misplaced. Tomorrow was another day, that's what she had to tell herself. Except it was another day alone. A day where the muesli sitting in a cupboard in her kitchen would remain untouched, and the toothbrush he left in her holder on the counter would remain unused. The day would come and go, but _she_ still felt as if she was stopped. Like someone was watching her life like a TV show, and just pressed the pause button, and didn't tell her when they were pressing play again. Was this the end of her love story with Derek?

She waited for him at Joe's. She had sat there for longer than was respectful to herself…she was shamelessly waiting and waiting…and deep down she knew that if they hadn't got that trauma page, she would have still been sitting there- unless Joe had kicked her out. It was better not knowing, it was better being in the dark, and still having that glimmer of hope that things would be ok, that Derek would turn up at the bar with his signature scrawled on the divorce papers, and her life with him could begin.

They had eleven birthdays, christmases, eleven years together. As if that was a good enough reason. A wife who didn't think much of the marriage to cheat on him. On his favourite sheets. Maybe he had a thing for sheets as well as ferryboats, he always smiled a little when she had the red sheets on her bed. A tear escaped the corner of her eye as she realised that she actually had those red sheets on her bed at the moment- she had put them on when they were supposed to have that date where they were going to make rules. Wine always got her drunk, especially red wine, and she had fully intended on celebrating the making of some rules by…well, breaking some in the bedroom. But now it was all hypothetical, and all useless. There was no Derek to make rules with anymore. She wished that Bailey hadn't forced her to go home at the end of that marathon shift from hell- those crimson coloured bedsheets mocked her.

Hope- there wasn't any of that anymore. There was no hope that he would come back to her, that he made a mistake with Addison, that he wanted to be with her. Why would he give up eleven years of a mostly decent marriage for some flighty intern whom he had known for only two months. They were still in the 'honeymoon' stage of the relationship, where everything seemed to be brighter and better than it really was. At least he knew what he was getting with Addison. Two months and great sex was no match for eleven years and being a family.

Addison was perfect. She came into work with perfectly coiffed hair, she had shoes that were more expensive than Meredith's entire closet, and she looked good in scrubs. No-one looked good in scrubs. Of course she wasn't enough. Meredith was just… _Meredith._ She was lucky if she had brushed her hair before she put it in a ponytail, she was fortunate if her scrub pants didn't threaten to fall off her slim waist, she was just the silly rebound girl, the anti-Addison.

A lot had happened in the last twenty three hours and…fifty nine minutes. Tomorrow was another day that brought even more heartache- she'd see 'The Shepherds' a functioning married couple, and she'd be the freak show. The news would spread through the hospital like wildfire, and she'd be like an exhibit at the zoo. She wasn't chosen. She's a whore. She's stupid for not knowing she's married, and the more Meredith thought about these things, the more she convinced herself it was true. She wracked her brain, tried recalling every moment of the last two blissful months trying to recall any moment where Derek hinted that he was estranged from his wife, that he was anything other than single, but she couldn't.

And then she got angry. Angry that she let him convince her to do this. She had compromised herself. She had told him no so many times, and he came back dreamier. There was no hint of the 'McDreamy' now. That was a misnomer. The sarcastic tone in which Cristina had said it the day Meredith was carrying round a severed penis in a cooler was the right one to use. Meredith wished that Derek's penis was severed right now. She was the intern screwing the married attending- she was the adulterous whore. She was even more damaged goods than she was before. Meredith had tried to overcome so many fears, gone against her need for distance to be with Derek and he knocked it all down.

Meredith cringed when she realised that she had admitted to herself- and him that she loved him for the first time in that speech she gave- that desperate little speech that came from her heart which was such a true Meredith moment. She had told him she loved him and it wasn't enough. Love wasn't enough. But if love wasn't enough, what was? She couldn't have offered him anymore than the commitment and love she was giving him. Meredith wished her mother was lucid. She laughed ruefully when she realised how messed up that was- she was wishing that she had that inflammatory relationship with her mother again where Ellis told her how ridiculous this was- what a stupid situation she had gotten herself into- how she should suck it up and move on. She had never seen a functioning relationship with a man from her mother- her mother had been married to her work. Maybe that's where Meredith was going wrong, she didn't know how to do any of this, and Addison did.

She had been hit by a metaphorical train. What was reality? Did the last eight weeks with Derek happen, or was she just imagining that his happened? Or was this a dream? Would she wake up and realise that her brain was just acting out her worst possible scenario? Derek was her glue. It felt like up till now he was holding her together. He was the only person she told that her mother wasn't with the UN, but was in a home. He had betrayed her so badly, made her think she was it for him. This is why Meredith didn't get close enough to any man to love someone- because it was always the people you love that knew how to hurt you the most. Sobs came from nowhere and wracked her body as her head pounded. She was crying because she was alone again- because she wasn't enough for him- that she let out Ellis's secret that wasn't hers to tell.

He didn't even tell her he chose his wife. He just made her guess. Everytime she had looked into his eyes, she had seen something that she mistook for love, she had faith that he had ended it, and hope that they could move on. But he didn't talk, he just sighed, shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other, and she knew him well enough by now- had studied him for long enough to know he was avoiding telling her something she prayed she would never have to hear.

"You're staying with her." She stated, her voice thick with abject realisation, willing that he would contradict her.

The contradiction never came.

"She's my wife." He gave as an explanation. As if that was everything Meredith needed to know. On some level it did explain everything. He had made a commitment to Addison, and he had to honour that. But he had made an unspoken commitment to Meredith too. He was ready to make rules with her, to be her real boyfriend, something permanent.

For the first time ever, Meredith had truly believed that those love stories could come true for her. That she could find the one, that she had a prince charming. But instead of the fairy tale with the happy ending, her life was like one of those never ending soap operas that dished out drama upon drama, crapping on the lead actress. She would never have her happy ending- and if she did have one- it wouldn't last long. That's just the way it was. She wasn't cast as Cinderella this time.

Meredith's teary eyes were transfixed on the red lettering on the alarm clock. **12:00**. It was a whole new day, the next day of the rest of her life. Derek was now her past.

_Meanwhile these three remain: faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is love._

Except this time, love wasn't enough.

_**If love was enough  
I'd wrap it around you  
If love was enough  
Maybe you'd stay  
I still remember  
If love was enough  
And you let it surround you  
No it's never enough**_

If love was enough  
I'd wrap it all around you  
If love was enough  
Maybe you'd stay  
You'd still be here with me  
If love was enough  
It would always surround you  
If love was enough for you.

**Graham Colton- If love was enough.**


	2. Chapter 2: Anniversaries

_**(A/N: I'm overwhelmed that people have favourited this story and put alerts or whatever on this fic. Thankyou so much to you and everone that have commented.)**_

_**CHAPTER 2: ANNIVERSARIES**_

Everything seemed so difficult lately. Internship was difficult, her mother was difficult, seeing Addison and Derek walk hand-in-hand out of the hospital felt impossible to endure. That was definitely the most difficult thing to deal with. They were functioning as a couple, and she was alone.

Meredith was curled up on the couch, the TV illuminating the room as it was muted by the sound of the heavy rain hitting every surface of the house. It pelted the glass like little bullets, relentless as it rained for hours and hours today. The sky was so black today that even day was as dark as dusk. Meredith leaned forward, picking up the lone glass of wine on the coffee table and brought it to her lips, sipping at it. She was drinking on her own, she had wrapped herself up in a blanket because there was no-one there to wrap themselves around her to keep her warm, and the TV was only on to fill the silence that had overtaken the house.

She was getting good at putting on the façade at work, trying not to look too broken that Derek wasn't chasing her around the hospital anywhere, and didn't act like she missed the cheeky banter between Derek and her that filled her days. But she did miss it, and she missed him while he was making it work with the wife. That brave exterior crumpled once she left the hospital, and she was still prone to finding a more secluded part of the hospital where she could mourn the loss of her boyfriend.

He could hold her hand without wanting to pull away. That was a huge step forward. He didn't recoil everytime her lips met his. He hoped that the visual of his wife on top of his best friend, moaning Mark's name would soon fade away- if he wanted to make this work, he had to. It was their eleventh wedding anniversary, and even though he thought there wasn't much they should really be celebrating about this year, Addison insisted on booking a table at the most expensive French restaurant in the whole of Seattle in celebration that they were back on track.

"_It wasn't as good as the one back in New York was it?" _Addison said absently, the sound of her heels click-clacking against the wet concrete as they reached the valet stand and Derek handed the attendant the ticket.

Derek smiled weakly back. He had tried to feign interest, but trying twenty four hours a day, seven days a week was exhausting, and trying to be the formidable partnership of Addison and Derek- especially today just seemed far too hard. He saw the lights of his BMW turn the corner as the valet drove up to them, and Derek tipped him with a crisp twenty dollar note. Derek hadn't even known this restaurant existed until one night last week when Addison told him about it.

He was sitting in bed, reading a fishing magazine trying to not make it look as if he was on the edge of the bed, trying to be as far away from the middle- from Addison as possible. He concentrated on the words in the article about fly fishing, about the 10 best fishing poles on the market- anything but Addison propositioning awkward sex, only for him to reject her advances again.

_"Look at this Derek…"_ Addison told him, forcibly making him take notice of _something_ she said. He always acted as if he was doing her a favour just listening to her. Maybe this anniversary was what she needed to re-inject the life back into the marriage again. She slid the laptop over to his lap, and inched closer to him tentatively. If he was any further over his side of the bed, he'd fall off.

"_It's a French restaurant- like the one we go to every anniversary since we got our fellowship- you know…if you cant bring Mohammed to the mountain, then we'll have to compromise."_

"_I don't know, Addison this year has been…"_ Derek sighed, trying not to groan. He wasn't up to celebrating.

"_It's been really hard, Derek. I know. Come on, it could be exactly what we need….Please?" _ She begged. Addison was pleading him, her fingers touching his bare arm. Derek flinched for a second, but gave in. He had to start somewhere, get over it, he had to justify leaving Meredith for something more than a miserable marriage that he didn't really make any effort to work at.

That was the problem. To Addison, Seattle was no match to New York, and to Derek- it was something blissfully different. It didn't provide the same life that led them to being lazy, to being absent and distant, it didn't allow them to fall into the bad habits that lead Addison to cheat on him. As Derek made his way round to the passenger side of the BMW to open the door for his wife, he wondered when Addison changed, when he changed, and how they managed to change in opposite ways.

The woman he married was the girl who bunked all family gatherings at Thanksgivings with him so they could study for the finals after the holiday and eat Chinese food out of the foil container as they spent four days in sweats. She wasn't the woman who found catalogues from places he didn't know existed and bought overpriced woollen goods from Scotland for Christmas.

Nine o'clock. Only three more hours of pretending everything was ok. For one day, Derek called a truce, scrabbling to find the easiness that was once second nature to this couple. That was what the counselling was for, and he hated it. It was admitting to another person that he failed in his marriage, that they lost something that was so fundamental in a relationship. He lost the love, he lost the friendship, and finding it again was proving to be so difficult. His hand lay casually on the centre console as they navigated the rainy Seattle streets downtown. Addison nervously placed her hand on top of his, giving it a squeeze as the diamond and platinum of her rings glistened, reflecting the diffuse light from the streetlamps outside. They passed the steakhouse he intended to take Meredith to the evening Addison came to town, and his heart panged for the girl he had cruelly rejected for his unfaithful wife. There was no longer a steak with her name on it. There was no bottle of wine for them to share. He broke promises he made to Meredith to honour ones he made with Addison that she had betrayed. How did his life become a mess?

Meredith was already on her second slice of devastatingly rich chocolate cake Izzie had made the day before. Comfort eating, comfort drinking and comfort crying ironically didn't bring her and comfort whatsoever. She looked up at the screen in front of her, the mouthful of moist sponge getting stuck in her throat as she saw the date in the corner of the screen. Five years ago today, Meredith had gotten a call while she was in France from her mother, telling her she had Alzheimer's, and she was going into a home. Meredith had thrown her belongings into her suitcase and flown straight home, hoping that she could get her life together and make her mother proud.

The dark chocolate suddenly made her feel sick, and she placed the plate on the table, snuggling back onto the worn couch, covering her head with the blanket, wishing this day wouldn't exist anymore. Ten o'clock. Two more hours. Midnight to midnight was all she could get through. One day at a time. She was acting like it was her mother's death anniversary or something- and in some ways it was. She had lost a mother that she maybe could have turned to, she lost the opportunity to build a relationship back with her mother, to use that energy and channel it into being motivated instead of rebellious. But she had lost her chance, and not even chocolate cake made her feel better.

It felt like the only thing that could make her feel better wasn't there. She didn't know how Derek managed to change her, make her need him quite like he had in those two months. Somewhere along the line it stopped being sex with her boss, somewhere in between the ferryboats and the breakfast, and had become something. It didn't stop because he chose the wife. That needyness just got worse.

She was trying so hard to function in the same hallways as him, answer his questions when she was on his cases, show him that she could move on. And then there were those times where the looks of pity softened into those looks of affection like they used to be, and it messed her up all over again. He always gave them to her when they were alone, so Meredith could have been imagining them. But the worst looks of all were the ones he had given her once or twice:

"_I think I've made a mistake."_

But he had never actually said those words to her, even if the frown in his forehead and the slump in his shoulders had. What do you do when someone you love cannot love you back? And even if he decided he could love Meredith and dump the wife, could they move on from Meredith always being the second choice?

She mentally kicked herself. Feeling alone was nothing new. She'd been used to it by now, being alone exactly five years ago when her mother went into a home. Meredith's trust fund was still paying for everything, but she had no one in her life that cared. She knew that on some level Ellis had the potential to care- but something in her life had damaged her so much that Ellis's defence mechanism was to show that she didn't. For those two months that Derek was in her life, someone actually genuinely cared for her, and she had gotten used to it, but that loneliness was back again, even though her friends had been great, it was no match for the security she was beginning to find in Derek- and she was doubtful she would ever experience it again with anyone else. Maybe Derek was her only shot at true happiness, and even if she couldn't be with him, trying to love someone like she loved Derek would have been settling for second best. She was supposed to be a passionate force of nature, she worked at something if she wanted it, but for the first time, she realised all the perseverance in the world couldn't make Derek come back to her. Meredith pulled the blanket from her eyes long enough to see that it was exactly 12.00 midnight, and she had to be up in four hours for rounds. Pretending to sleep in her bed was better than pretending to sleep on the couch.

"_That was good, wasn't it?" _Addison asked her husband, seeking his approval, needing to know that at least something was the same as before. He could barely even bring himself to touch her again, as he nodded weakly, unable to meet her eyes. It was awkward, it was fumbly, it wasn't what it used to be, it wasn't the best he ever had, and it was their anniversary. That was the only reason he even gave in to her suggestion. If he couldn't find it in him to make love to his wife on his anniversary, what was he even doing in this marriage.

Derek's feelings of pleasure as his wife caught her breath beside him in the bed in the trailer were soon replaced with feelings of guilt. His movements had felt robotic above her, the sounds and touches like a boring routine. The only way he could do it was pretend that he didn't have fistfuls of red hair in his hands, but messy blonde strands. It was quiet, and his eyes were shut all the time, scared that he would utter the wrong name, and his eyes would betray that he saw someone else that wasn't Addison. He flipped off the light and pretended to sleep as he looked up through the skylight in the roof of his trailer, watching the full moon create sliver streaks on the skylight as it reflected off the raindrops. He was cheating both of them- Addison and Meredith. He had rejected Meredith, but could only think of her, and Addison was thinking their marriage was on the mend, and the only way he could get though any kind of intimacy with her was by pretending she was Meredith- his dirty mistress. Their marriage wasn't being fixed. It was more broken than ever.

He turned onto his side, away from his wife. His eyes met the clock, as he watched the numbers change- from 11.59 to 12.00. It was no longer his wedding anniversary. He exhaled deeply with relief. He didn't have to try so hard anymore, compared to the last twenty four hours. It was all dependent on a split second. If only he hadn't just made it on that train on the subway, he'd have never caught Mark and Addison. If he hadn't decided to explore further than the hospital parking lot in that moment, finding Joe's bar. If only in that split second, he decided to choose Meredith and not Addison- his life could have been so different. It only took a second for tomorrow to turn into today.

_**Do you ever feel like you're all alone?  
And do you ever feel like you're the only one  
Who can feel the pain, but you act ok  
And I really hope that there's something more  
Cuz I feel I don't have much to show  
For anything in my life, for anything in my life...  
**_

_**But there is hope in the pain  
Hope in my tears  
And even my shame  
And I have hope in my doubts  
And hope in my faults  
Even in my fears **_

_**  
Do you ever feel like nothing's going right?  
And do you ever feel like you've got nowhere to go,  
But you tell yourself you can't quite let this go  
I really hope that there's something more  
Cuz I feel I don't have much to show  
Worth anything in my life, worth anything in my life...**_

_**  
But there is hope in the pain  
Hope in my tears  
And even my shame  
And I have hope in my doubts  
And hope in my faults  
Even in my fears**_

**Ryan Calhoun- Hope.**


	3. Chapter 3: Birthday

Meredith sighed as she leaned against the counter at the nurses station, filling in a drug chart as she peeked at her watch. 11:45 ….. another eight hours and fifteen minutes left of her shift, before she could go home. She scribbled her signature in the corner, adding it to the pile of charts she had completed. As she completed more and more of them, she became more slumped over at the station, answering questions nurses had about some patient care, answering calls that seemed to follow her everywhere. This night shift was turning out to be no different to the others.

Derek had broken up with her for a couple of months now, and it was gradually feeling better. They had found themselves in some weird limbo of friendship, trying to ignore the sexual tension that crackled between them. They had started with sex, and although they always had that connection where talking about nothing came easy to them, Meredith was still amazed they had managed to dodge all the important issues during those two months together- like the fact Derek had a wife, and that she had never been in a normal functioning relationship with a boy before. But then again- the sex was _really _too good to spoil it with heavy conversation. So now they stuck to borderline flirty friendship, and Meredith would take what she could get. At least she knew she had picked an honourable man- it was honourable to try his best in his marriage- even if he wasn't honourable to her.

It made it easier that Addison was nice- well, ok, sometimes it was a lot harder. It made it hard for her to hate her, and Addison had seemed to think that because Derek was trying to form a friendship with his dirty mistress, she ought to as well. Meredith still felt alone, meaningless sex hadn't filled the void Derek had created in her life, but she had lived so many years of her life with different men in her bed, but still alone, so at least it wasn't new. Addison was fabulous, and Meredith wasn't. Addison miraculously had a million fellowships, was desired as the west coast's top neonatologist, and Meredith was fighting to keep her position in her residency. Meredith could see why a man like Derek was perfectly suited to a woman like Addison. It didn't mean that it didn't hurt though.

Meredith held up her head with her left hand, willing it not to fall onto the counter in exhaustion as she tried and failed to hide her huge yawn behind her hand. Meredith's writing had gotten sloppier every chart she filled, and she didn't envy the nurse who had to try and read her illegible writing. She just didn't have the energy to try. Not tonight- she just wanted to find an on-call room and pretend to sleep a few hours away.

"Dr. Grey, you're needed on the neuro floor." A nurse told her just as she signed the very last chart. Great. No sleep.

She jabbed the 'up' button on the elevator forcefully before stepping inside it, leaning against the back wall for support. She was just so tired of pretending everything could turn out ok for her one day. She wanted one day to be today. Tomorrow was another day, and maybe it would be better than this one, better than the last two months. The door to the elevator 'dinged' almost too happily, and Meredith trudged to the nurses station, raising her eyebrows questioningly as she shoved her hands deep into her lab coat pockets, hoping whatever they wanted wouldn't take too long. They shrugged non-commitally insisting that they didn't know why Meredith had been dragged three floors up from urology for no reason.

Just as she was about to turn away, Derek came into view from around the corner, his ferryboat scrubcap in his hands, his hair flat from being contained in the cap for hours on end. He saw her, glanced at his watch and smiled. Meredith frowned, and wondered what he wanted from her. Maybe to oversee the patient post op or something.

"Meredith…" He grinned at her. In these moments, she swore he forgot he had a wife waiting for him, that he didn't choose her. She smiled weakly back at him, and looked down at the floor so she didn't have to look at _him_.

"Just make this good, Derek. I could be sleeping right now. That's what you do when you're on-call at night. Find a bed and sleep as much as possible before you get paged. " Meredith groaned. She was starting to like the night shifts for the simple reason she could avoid seeing Derek and Addison. They were friends, or….she was pretending that she could be his friend, but it still left her drained from trying to make out like she was ok with it. Because she wasn't. It killed her. But some Derek was better than no Derek at all.

"Ok…I need to show you something…" He said, leading her down the hallway to his office….or the janitor's closet as they had once affectionately called it. She wondered what Addison called it, or whether she was so distracted and dismayed by the trailer that Derek's office was the least of her problems.

Meredith sighed, knowing that it would be a bad idea. She knew all the nurses would be wondering exactly what Meredith was doing in the middle of the night following her ex-boyfriend married neurosurgeon boss to his office. Even she wasn't sure what was going to happen. He opened the door to his office and strode through the door, while Meredith stood at the threshold to the office, making sure the door was wide open while she watched Derek fluster around behind his desk looking for something.

He moved his bag from under his desk and found what he was looking for, bringing the plastic bag onto his desk, shifting the piles of paper on the desk to make room. Derek smiled at her again as he took a box out of the bag and revealed a slice of cake, from her favourite bakery downtown with a single candle stuck in the middle.

Meredith's stomach fell like lead to the floor, and she began to feel lightheaded. He remembered. She dared herself to inch forward towards him, the desk and the cake, even though she just wanted to run. The floor felt like quicksand underneath her, every step was an effort, and she knew that on many levels this was inappropriate and dangerous. But he was just a friend, a friend that she was still in love with and could never be with, but a friend all the same.

"You remembered…." Meredith croaked out, hoping that her voice didn't betray how emotional she felt.

"Of course I'd remember when your birthday is, Meredith." Derek replied, only realising then how messed up this was. He was buying a slice of cake for his mistress…or ex-mistress, and his wife was at home, waiting for him. He saw from her expression that she didn't expect this at all, that she thought that after he'd chosen Addison, he'd just forget all the time they spent together, all the conversations they had watching the ferryboats, or at his trailer, or in bed. Maybe he should have feigned that he had forgotten that she told him her birthday was in two minutes. But he cared. He cared more than he should have done.

Meredith cleared her throat, not wanting Derek to know how much this moved her. He wasn't her boyfriend anymore, they were just friends. And he was married. She couldn't read more into this other than that this was a friendly gesture. She wouldn't allow herself to be sucked into that vortex that they seemed to create around each other, where the world fell away and for those moments, it was just Meredith and Derek. Because Meredith and Derek didn't exist anymore. "Let's just light the candle and get on with it." Meredith said, not wanting to be with him any longer than she had to. It was still too painful. She stepped closer to the desk where the matches lay on the desk, but Derek quickly picked them up and put them in his pocket.

"You can't light your own candle and blow it out. That's sad. Just one more minute…" He said, squinting at his watch.

"I think your watch is slow…" Meredith countered, ignoring her own advice and falling into the friendly banter they were used to.

Derek ignored her, and kept glancing from his watch to her face, counting down from ten. "It's midnight!" he smiled, lighting the candle and singing to her. "Make a wish…" He whispered in her ear.

Meredith dared to look up at him, the flickering candle being the only light between them, illuminating his face with a dim glow. She looked at his face, into his eyes, things that were so familiar yet so forbidden. She wasn't a mistress, she wouldn't be a party to adultery, make it easy to string her and Addison both along, even if she so desperately wanted to. It was ironic that the one thing she wished for she couldn't have- she just wanted Derek back. _Wishes don't come true._ Even his smile was weak now, and his eyes had a thin film of tears over them as they shared this moment together. He hoped that she wished that they could be together too, that he could turn back time and pick her, choose her, love her. But he couldn't.

She blew out the candle, and took a step back, not trusting herself completely. Some moments, these encounters with Derek seemed so easy, where they let their natural chemistry and attraction take them to places emotionally that they shouldn't really go, and other moments, being with Derek and not acting on her emotions was just too hard. Sometimes she rationalised _'Addison cheated first.'_ It wasn't her fault she fell in love with Derek Shepherd, who turned out to be married. It hurt her more than all of her fights with Ellis put together to think that they couldn't be a couple, to think where they could have been right now if Derek had have chosen her. Just the thought of it made her exhausted, and she plopped down in the chair the other side of the desk, as Derek cut the piece of cake in half, handing her one piece.

"Thankyou for all of this, Derek." Meredith said earnestly, breaking a corner off the cake with her fork.

Derek made himself sit the other side of the desk, not trusting himself to not touch her if he sat beside her. "It's nothing, Meredith. I just wanted to be the one to wish you happy birthday first." He smiled. "I didn't know what your plan was for the rest of the day, and you deserve to celebrate it…"

"Izzie's got this lunchtime cake cutting thing planned. She'd shortlisted possible cakes when I left for this shift." Meredith laughed, remembering the in-depth discussion George and Izzie were having in the kitchen between red velvet sponge and chocolate cake. "Then, after I finish work, I might go see my Mom, see if she remembers who I am let alone that it's my birthday…"

It took every ounce of self control for Derek to resist the urge to move to the other side of the desk and touch her, hold her and reassure her that everything would be ok. That wasn't his job anymore, and that was his choice. He hoped Meredith knew how cut up he was about not choosing her, that she knew how long he antagonised over it, and even regretted it. Derek looked at her sad eyes, looking away from him.

"Even if she doesn't remember you, Meredith, I'm sure she still cares about you." Derek insisted, feeling the need to fill the silence with platitudes.

Was this what they were reduced to now? Talking about every other issue apart from the huge freaking elephant in the room which was the undeniable connection they shared. One moment they were in love, intending to gorge on expensive steaks and have hot sex, and the next- her dreamy boyfriend had a secret cheating wife, and Meredith had become the bad guy. His actions betrayed his conversations, and his expressions betrayed his emotions. This was just too hard.

Meredith stood up from her seat unable to bear it any longer. All she wanted was to spend her birthday alone with Derek somewhere, and not have to worry about sick mothers, or acting lovesick around her ex-boyfriend. She just wanted to feel some happiness again, instead of trying to put on a brave face and move on with her life. It seemed like everyone else was moving on, and she was just stuck, watching them go by, and she just couldn't make herself jumpstart. She had to end this before she internalised even more, and spiralled into a deeper depression.

"It's late, you should go home, get some sleep. Addison will probably be wondering where you are." Meredith told him, her voice squeakier than usual, as she tried not to cry.

"Addison knows not to wait up for me by now." Derek admitted, standing up on the other side of the desk as he watched Meredith turn away. He just wanted to keep her for a little while longer before they were separated again. They had shared a moment, and it had given them both a taste of what could have been if Derek had made the right choice.

Meredith turned back around to face him, her eyes clashing with his. "Do you love her?" She asked, unable to control the words coming out of her mouth. She wasn't sure she really wanted to hear the answer, but she needed to know exactly _what_ made him choose Addison other than the reason that she was his wife.

Derek saw the fire in Meredith's eyes, and the need for him to be truthful. "I don't know…" Derek confessed, looking down, unable to look at Meredith anymore. He gave her up for someone he wasn't even sure he loved anymore.

Meredith swallowed what felt like a lump of cake making it's way up her throat, as it felt like the blood had drained from her body at Derek's disclosure. She had to be the better person. "It's good that you're trying. You wouldn't be you if you weren't the kind of person that was trying to make it work." Meredith smiled sadly.

He looked up from his study of the patterns of weaving on the carpet, his eyes meeting hers magnetically, his eyebrows raised in surprise and shock. "You think so?" He asked softly.

Meredith couldn't control it any longer, and a tear escaped from her eye and rolled down her cheek before she could catch it. "Yeah. Means I wasn't wrong about you."

Her confession only confirmed that despite all the crap he had put her through she was still magnanimous, that she carried herself with respect, and still loved him even though he didn't deserve it. More importantly, she _knew_ him, understood him, and accepted him for the man that he had become- that the circumstances in his life had made him change into. She didn't know that Derek Shepherd once wore designer suits, had a huge sprawling house in the Hamptons, had a maid to do everything in the house, right down to the cooking. She knew and loved the Derek Shepherd the events in his life had turned him into, even though she didn't know what those events were.

She really deserved better than what he could offer her right now.

"Happy Birthday, Meredith." Derek whispered softly as Meredith turned away again, walking towards the door.

Meredith felt his sadness even though her back was turned, knowing he had felt the full force of her words. "Thankyou, Derek." Meredith said, turning back at the doorway, looking at his lone figure in the light of his desklamp before walking away.

**_I'm walking away with all my beliefs_**

**_Standing there was a lovesick misery_**

**_Oh I find_**

**_That a love that's hardly comeback_**

**_It gets hard to breathe, yeah_**

**_Standing there was a lovesick misery_**

**_And I wait for an angel to come_**

**_You have broken my heart but I'm holding on_**

**_Oh if I could just make you see_**

**_My heart is deep in a lovesick misery._**

**Sanders Bohlke- Lovesick Misery.**


	4. Chapter 4: A feeling

**CHAPTER 4: A FEELING.  
**

Today was one of those days that Meredith wished she could just press the rewind button and make different choices. She wouldn't have let Cristina literally kick her out of bed in the morning, she would have locked the door and not come out until it was 12 o'clock midnight, and another day. She definitely wouldn't have stuck her hand inside that guy's body cavity, and she wouldn't have walked out into the hallway to see what happened to Dylan and the bomb. She would have just run for her life to the elevator. But she didn't, and everything that had happened today was horrifyingly real.

Izzie and Cristina had finally left her alone after hovering around her, making sure she wasn't going to go into a post traumatic shock after she tried to make herself sound put together for the counsellor she saw for half an hour. No one could make this better. She saw a guy _blow up._ How could she put into words how traumatising that really was? Meredith pulled the covers tighter over herself, wishing for a second time today that Derek was by her side, making her feel better by knowing the right thing to say. She screwed her eyes shut as the tears made their way out of the corners. She was never alone more than she was now. A tiny part of her wished that she had died along with Dylan, because in that moment, perhaps she didn't have much to live for. Her mother was re-living the heyday of her residency, either thinking Meredith was five years old, or telling her intimate, embarrassing details of her affair with Richard Webber- her chief of surgery. She had no one.

Derek raked his hand though his hair for the thousandth time since he sat on the hammock on the deck at his trailer, exhaling deeply. He glanced towards the bedroom window, looking through the glass towards Addison who sported a concerned expression on her face, but was still reading her 'Vogue' magazine. It was ten thirty. Last time he was out here after dark, he had wrapped himself up in blankets and coats as Meredith snores made the walls of the trailer vibrate, and now, he was outside because he could almost hear the unsaid questions Addison had wanted to ask him. Even her unspoken thoughts had become irritating to him now, and he was missing the snores coming from that tiny person that had kept him awake for so many nights. Addison was a quiet sleeper, and the only mild annoyance was that sometimes she kicked. It was funny- he had slept next to Addison most nights for eleven years and he hadn't missed her when he moved to Seattle, yet he spent maybe six weeks in bed next to Meredith, and imagining she was snoring beside him was the only thing that lulled him into a sleep some nights. If Meredith had such an impact on him in only two months, why did he put such importance on eleven years of indifference?

"_That's not the 'she' he was asking for."_

That's what the chief's wife had noted after Derek half heartedly fell into his wife's hug, and she couldn't have been more right. He had felt guilty that he didn't even think about Addison during the whole debacle, and yet she was running to him, being the concerned wife, and even when she was embracing him, all he wanted was to know if Meredith was alright. He hadn't been able to see her, she was in the shower, she was getting a CT, she was speaking to a counsellor, and by then Derek had run out of excuses to hang around the hospital to see her. The chief and Addison had almost dragged him out of that hospital. Not choosing her, but depending on her, hanging on those few lines of friendly conversation everyday was what kept him going. It was wrong, but he couldn't see any other way out. Everyday he woke up and he hoped something would happen with Addison to make him fall in love with her again, instead of just love her like you loved someone after living with them for eleven years. He knew why he chose her instead of Meredith- it was just easier. He already knew everything about her, and maybe it was just too much hard work to get to that stage of comfortability with someone again.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that the light in the bedroom had eventually turned off, and he could almost hear Addison sigh in defeat through the aluminium walls, as she stayed up as long as she could in the hope that Derek would come to her to talk. But what was he supposed to say? That he still loved Meredith- he had already told her at Christmas that he had loved Meredith, and that his choice wasn't easy. He didn't tell her that he had regretted it nearly everyday since he had made it, that he was waiting for her to make another wrong move so he could go back and try with Meredith.

He waited a few more minutes until he thought Addison was really asleep before he quietly opened the door and grabbed his keys from the table- he just had to know if Meredith was ok. Addison's eyes opened when she heard his car door shut and the engine start, and she bit back a sob as she heard his tyres crunch on the dirt gravel track. She knew he was going to see her, at quarter to eleven at night. What hurt even more was that he was desperate for her not to know where he was going, as he didn't turn on his headlights, not wanting them to shine into the windows and wake her. Addison's hand traced the dent in his pillow as she let the tears flow this time, wondering whether he would have cared so much if she were the person holding the bomb. As he drove further away, she could feel her marriage slipping away with it. How much longer could she hold onto the memories of the marriage they used to have?

Derek tried not to speed through the streets of Seattle as he neared Meredith's house. She had nearly died- and he would have let her go without letting her know how much he still loved her- that had he known she was 'the girl with the bomb' earlier, he would have done everything he could to get her out of that situation. If he didn't have Bailey's husband's brain exposed on his operating table, he would have dropped everything and ran to her. He clearly recalled every feeling when Cristina told him, how his heart sunk to his shoes, how he felt the adrenaline surge through his body.

'_wait for it to pass.'_

That was the advice he gave her when she confided to him that she had a feeling. He had been waiting for this feeling that he made a mistake trying in his marriage to pass, for his love that he had for Meredith to pass. Nothing was passing, maybe there are some feelings in life that stick with you- that are innate and instinctual. Maybe it was that special feeling that made him approach that pretty blonde girl at Joe's bar. It didn't pass. He should have told her to learn from his mistakes and act on every freaking feeling she had, not to wait for feelings to pass that probably wouldn't pass. He had nearly lost Meredith, and if she had died, he couldn't have pretended to Addison that his feelings for Meredith weren't as strong anymore- because if anything, day by day they grew stronger. Not once had she acted like the bitter ex-girlfriend, she had been able to hold her head high and act with dignity even though he and Addison flaunted their 'trying' all around the hospital.

'_I have a feeling I might die today.'_

Meredith was glad that the feeling wasn't that she was definitely going to die. She had reiterated to Cristina as Dylan was attaching the flak jacket to her body that she had a feeling. She had many of those, but she was generally a 'doom and gloom' person- her glass was always half empty. But she didn't consider it to be pessimism- her life was truly half empty. The negatives in her life far outweighed the positives. Everyone knew about her mother's Alzheimer's even if her mother didn't know who she really was, she had fallen in love with a seemingly perfect man after only two months, and even though he had actually chosen the wife over her over four months ago- twice the amount of time they were together- her feelings hadn't changed at all. She still gave everything to his wife it seemed. She had handed over him- her first love, and her dog… the life she was supposed to have. He hadn't even come to see her. Being blown up by a freaking bomb- having a guy become pink mist and spray all over her wasn't enough for him to re-evaluate his marriage. Wasn't the whole point of near-death experiences to see what was important in life?

Derek had parked his car on the opposite side of the street, sitting in darkness as the rain had finally stopped. He hoped he would be able to see her silhouette through the window, see she was ok, and that would be enough for him. He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel restlessly, sighing heavily as he debated with himself whether he should go and _see_ if she was alright. It was 11.50, and already late. Maybe she was asleep already, and he'd be disturbing them. But he couldn't wait till tomorrow to see her. He had to see her today.

Izzie heard the doorbell ring, and wondered who would be at their door so late. Cristina had gone home after much cajoling, and she wouldn't be back until tomorrow. Alex was still working, as was George. She opened the door to see Derek on the other side of it, looking up at her in surprise.

"Dr. Shepherd…" Izzie said warily, unsure why he was visiting so late, and whether it would be a good idea to let him in.

Derek noticed her defiant stance, blocking entry into the house he had virtually lived in, her arms crossed across her chest as she eyed him questioningly. "I just... is Meredith ok?" he asked her.

"As fine as someone can be after she was thrown ten feet by an exploding bomb." Izzie replied snippily. She still hated him for what she did to him. Those secret feelings Meredith and she had discussed over chocolate cake a few months ago weren't so secret anymore, and Meredith was barely holding it together. She wanted to tell him how depressed Meredith really was, how they couldn't get her out of bed this morning, how she was barely looking after herself. But it wasn't her place to tell him that. She looked at him carefully with her deep brown eyes- the concern in his expression was evident, and she knew he still cared about her. Maybe Meredith needed to see that too. "I'll see if she's still awake…" Izzie finally relented, letting her arms fall by her side as she went up the stairs to call Meredith.

Derek hadn't been here since Meredith had beaten him out of the house with her purse- the night she found the unsigned divorce papers. He wished Addison didn't know him so well, and didn't know how to push his buttons so perfectly, and _know_ how to make him not sign, to make him doubt his desire to divorce her. But she had. She had played him so well, and while Meredith had hoped her heartfelt speech would be enough to convince him to choose her- he told her it wasn't enough. He stood in the middle of the hall a little uneasily, taking in the familiar smell of the place that had begun to feel a little like home, a place he had hoped at one time he would have been spending a lot of time- which through his decisions had been cut short.

He could so easily change all of that- admit defeat, tell Addison his marriage wasn't working, that they had taken it as far as they could and give himself wholly to Meredith. But she might not take him back- she might not give him a second chance, and maybe being with someone and not happy was better than being alone. Derek's thoughts were cut short by the tired shuffling of feet on the top step, as he saw Meredith clutch the handrail and come down the stairs gingerly. He sighed as she stopped short in front of him, unsure of why he was there.

"Hey…" Meredith greeted tentatively.

Derek shifted his weight from one foot to another, repeating the 'hey' she had given to him just a second before. His eyes surveyed her body quickly, the only obvious sign of any trauma was the gash on her forehead, and some soreness. He so badly wanted to reach out and touch her skin, but she had kept enough distance between them so that he couldn't reach out with his hand.

"You almost died today…" was the only thing Derek thought was a safe enough thing to say. She almost died today, but yet she was standing there infront of him, and she would live to see another day.

"Yeah, I almost died today." Meredith echoed, her voice low and sombre as she made no effort to move closer towards him. He was married, Addison was waiting for him, and even if she nearly did die today, she couldn't live with herself knowing she made the first move in breaking up her ex-boyfriend's marriage. He was trying, and so was she.

Derek opened his mouth to speak, nearly telling her everything he had wanted to tell her for months. That he didn't love Addison like he loved her, that he had regretted his decision to try with his wife. But he couldn't, because Meredith was just standing there, waiting…and maybe by now she had gotten fed up of it. It wasn't fair of him to be there, in her house, confusing her like that. If he loved her- he'd leave. And so he turned round, and opened the front door. He took one step out into the cold night air, before he heard Meredith take a step forward and speak.

"I can't…" He heard her say, and he stopped to turn around and listen to her. "I can't remember our last kiss. All I could think about was I'm going to die today and I can't remember our last kiss. Which is pathetic, but the last time we were together and happy I want to be able to remember that. And I can't Derek. I can't remember."

It took everything in his control to embrace her and never let her go. She was so broken, and it was his instinct to take care of her. But he was responsible for that broken fragility that oozed out of every word she spoke. She was opening up to him in such a tender way. But he couldn't so this after she had already been through so much emotional turmoil that very day. Derek knew that exact moment she was wanting so hard to recall. He had been re-living it over in his mind too, trying to fool himself that it was Meredith kissing him every morning and not Addison. But if he let on that he knew, he'd have to admit that she still affected him as much as she did- yet he was the one who chose his wife.

"I'm glad you didn't die today." He said earnestly, forcing himself to turn back round.

He stepped out of the house fully now, and it felt like her chance with him truly had gone. He didn't remember either, probably knowing that the wife was going to show up that evening. She couldn't have been all that important, just a fling…just a rebound. It didn't matter that he was scratching an itch, and she fell in love. Whatever hope Meredith had fell away as the hinges on the front door began to squeak as Derek closed the door, and she turned round slowly to face the stares, to prepare for another night of staring out of the window, back facing Derek's side of the bed so she didn't have to remind herself he wasn't there again that night.

Derek was watching her walk back towards the stairs slowly. He couldn't lie to her. She had nearly died, and he was still pretending to no-one but himself and her how much she meant to him. If he could give her nothing else, he'd give her the memory that he could recall so vividly. "It was a Thursday morning... " he began.

Meredith turned back around at the sound of his voice, seeing his eyes soften into a different shade of blue as he remembered the moment she had tried so hard for so long to remember. It meant something to him too, it wasn't just all in her head, it wasn't only one sided. "You were wearing that ratty little Dartmouth t-shirt you look so good in. The one with the hole in the back of the neck. You'd just washed your hair and you smelled like some kind of flower. I was running late for surgery. You said you were gonna see me later and you leaned to me, you put your hand on my chest and you kissed me. Soft. Was quick, kinda like a habit. You know, like we'd do it every day for the rest of our lives. You went back to reading the newspaper and I went to work. That was the last time we kissed." He told her softly, his fingers clutching the doorframe so he could resist the urge of running them through her hair. Now he knew why his instinct was not to tell her- all those feelings had come flooding back, and they were almost too much to control. He walked out again, trying to shut the door before he went back running to her.

But Meredith decided to answer him. "Lavender. My hair smelled like lavender from my conditioner." Who cared that her overuse of said conditioner gave her brittle bones? Derek remembered it, and loved it. He remembered every little minute detail, he had remembered it for both of them.

Derek smiled. "Lavender. Huh." He shut the door for real this time, unable to control his feelings for the woman he loved.

Meredith smiled ruefully at the fuzzy memories that day as exhaustion hit her, and she walked back towards the stairs. He remembered. That would have to be enough for now.

Derek chastised himself, running his hand through his hair as he couldn't make it to his car that was parked on the other side of the street. He paced on Meredith's porch a few times. She had a feeling, and she nearly died today, and everyday he had a feeling that Meredith was the love of his life, and for four months he had been waiting for it to pass. Everyday he woke up, and expected it to be less painful than the day before, yet he got more and more entwined in the lie he told himself. But if Meredith had died that day… she would have died not knowing the truth her deserved to know.

"Meredith!" Derek called out as Meredith placed her foot on the first step. "I've waited now…I've waited for long enough. Some feelings…they don't pass. They're real-and if you want to live, you need to listen to them. My feelings for you-they will never pass." His voice thick with emotion as his eyes teared up. He ran to the step which Meredith had climbed, and held her hand, bringing her down. Her hand felt smaller than he remembered, and he gently took her hand and placed it on his chest as he leaned forward, his lips touching hers for the first time in months. This feeling definitely wasn't worth passing up.

Meredith was stunned at first, as his soft lips made contact with hers. He was everything she remembered, and more. That musky 'Derek' scent was still the same, and she revelled in the familiarity as his hands slipped down gently to her waste where they were meant to be. They got lost in the kiss as they both deepened it. The clock in the hall chimed midnight as the lovers reunited, as they began a day really together instead of apart.

_**Something always brings me back to you.  
It never takes too long.  
No matter what I say or do I'll still feel you here 'til the moment I'm gone.**_

_**You hold me without touch.  
You keep me without chains.  
I never wanted anything so much than to drown in your love and not feel your rain.**_

_**Set me free, leave me be. I don't want to fall another moment into your gravity.  
Here I am and I stand so tall, just the way I'm supposed to be.  
But you're on to me and all over me.  
**_

_**You loved me 'cause I'm fragile.  
When I thought that I was strong.  
But you touch me for a little while and all my fragile strength is gone.**_

**Sara Bareilles-Gravity.**


	5. Chapter 5: Choices

_**CHAPTER 5: CHOICES.**_

Derek was trying to control the tears that were threatening to fall from his eyes as he drove to Meredith's house, but as he tried to blink them back as they blurred his vision, a large one spilled onto his cheek. His hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, his knuckles turning white as he resisted the urge to scream. He was driving back from the Archfield to Meredith's house even though it was late, and he was tired, having been quarantined earlier that day. He had to see her.The divorce papers were sitting in a brown paper envelope on the passenger's seat, signed by both him and Addison. He didn't know if he was crying because he had just ended his eleven year marriage, or the scene he had just witnessed.

Even though Meredith and he had kissed the night of the bomb- he hadn't done anything more with her since- except last night, at the stupid prom the chief had organised for his niece. Meredith had gotten it into her head that Derek had to have the divorce paperwork completed before they took the next step of sleeping together again, imploring that she couldn't be the dirty mistress again, that Derek had to be sure that he really did want his marriage to end before he made that commitment- with rules to Meredith once more. Those papers signified a beginning and an end for him, and he was mourning and celebrating them both.

Until he had caught his wife in bed with his best friend, he really had thought it would last forever, and when he landed in Seattle, for the first time in over fifteen years, he realised he had no one. Starting back on the dating scene was daunting- and upsetting. His hair was greying, his physique wasn't what it used to be, and he had a lot of baggage. As he sat there in Joe's bar he had been there panicking, wondering how he was going to have to learn to flirt and charm like he used to, rather than just take it all for granted. And then he saw that girl ordering a shot of tequila, only sipping at it slowly as she engaged in a friendly conversation with the bartender. He would practise getting back on the ladder with her. Little did he know it would lead to sex- the first time he had had sex with someone other than Addison in fifteen years- which would lead to a love that was stronger than love he had for his wife.

Derek tried to shake those images of New York and his cheating wife out of his head, but he couldn't. They had all come flooding back as he saw his virtually naked former- best friend emerge from a steam filled shower wearing only a towel. His just-ex wife had been dressed in a dressing gown, it didn't take a genius to realise what had happened. The champagne he had just sipped to celebrate the eleven years they were married started to make it's way up his throat as he looked down the flute in his hand. That glass wasn't meant for him. It was meant for Mark. After everything, Addison still called him, and he came running. They hadn't regretted anything. It hadn't been a mistake, and only one thing would make him feel better- Meredith.

Meredith ran her hand through her hair, shuffling into the kitchen tiredly as she surveyed the mess all over every available surface. The state in the kitchen reflected the state of her life. Her roommate was still lying on the bathroom floor in her fancy dress, her hair all matted from the hairspray and her eyes all puffy from crying. Not to mention, Meredith had broken that promise she had made to herself after Derek kissed her the night of the bomb, and had slept with him in an exam room last night. Dirty, lost panties, not-quite-adulterous sex. Derek had told her that after speaking to his lawyer, the papers might get pushed through today, but after the quarantine drama, she wasn't sure if he would come to her house, and she couldn't leave Izzie alone in this situation.

She had been at the OR board yesterday, looking at the scheduled surgeries, wondering when Denny was going to get his new heart when Derek sidled up to her.

"Hey…" He said softly, giving her a small smile.

They had promised each other they would take it slow, and to Meredith's surprise, Derek had been remarkably good about it all since that night they kissed. He never pushed her into relenting and always went back to his trailer before it got too late. They found that friendly banter and affection again, as he sat with her at lunch or met her in Joe's and teased her about her hopeless knitting project, as he laughed when she explained it's merits, helping to distract her from her self-induced celibacy while improving her surgical dexterity. The sweater she promised to make for him had quickly been changed to a scarf that was currently sitting on his back seat, with one side significantly wider than the other.

"Hey…" She smiled back, her heart warming at him being by her side again. She was under Bailey's orders to arrange the catering for the prom, but had taken a detour to see what was happening with Denny.

"How's the Denny thing going?" Derek asked Meredith cautiously. He knew that the chief had put them on a 'time out', a suspension of any type of clinical duty until he found out who was responsible, but to Derek, it was a no-brainer. Everyone knew it was Izzie, she just had yet to admit it.

"It's…going." Meredith sighed, shrugging her shoulders in defeat as she tore her eyes away from Derek and looked back at the board.

Derek frowned in concern, moving a step closer to her, gently nudging her shoulder with his. "Meredith…wanna go to prom with me?" He asked her with a beaming smile, going a little red.

Meredith laughed, rolling her eyes. "Sure. Whatever. Unless I get a better offer."

Even though Meredith had never been to a prom before, her prom was pretty much cliché, sleeping with her boyfriend for the first time…first time in a long time, nearly getting caught, having a drama at the end of the night that put a dampener on the whole event…and now she was waiting for the boy to call her back.

That night of the prom, Derek was talking to Addison politely by the punch bowl, not quite smiling but not quite scowling as he held the paper cup in his hand. He did a double take when he saw Meredith come down the stairs in her simple yet beautiful black dress, her hair down and wavy as her eyes met his and she flashed him a small smile. She had managed to rush home and change just in time, and even though she looked flustered, Derek thought she looked beautiful. Addison saw him ignore her talking about her adolescent Star Wars fandom for staring at Meredith and quietly walked away, avoiding having to listen to them together. Just because the divorce was amicable, it didn't mean she wanted her soon-to-be ex-husband flaunt the woman he divorced her for in her face.

"You look wonderful Meredith…" Derek beamed, handing her a cup of the punch.

"God, I wish this were alcoholic…" She sighed, taking a sip.

"High school punches generally aren't…unless they're spiked…which…they usually are." Derek laughed, slipping his hand lightly around her waist.

"Wouldn't know…didn't go." Meredith said, leaning into him slightly. She saw the shocked expression on Derek's face and explained further. "It wasn't an Ellis thing. I just wasn't that girl. I was…angry, wore a lot of black, had pink hair...I hung around with a lot of college boys."

"Pink hair?!" Derek bit the side of his cheek to suppress his laughter. "Hmm…I was…a band geek. Braces, unmanageable afro hair and acne…BAD acne. I think I went to prom with a girl from band, and that's only because my mom and sisters forced me to."

Meredith smiled wrly. "How things change."

"They do. Thank god." Derek nodded, hearing the music change to a slow tempo. "Wanna dance?" He asked, taking her hand.

"I thought you don't dance in public?" Meredith said amusedly.

"It's only slow dancing…" Derek replied, taking the cup from her hand and leading her to the dancefloor. "Besides, I'll make an exception for you…"

His perfect words transported her to the perfect prom she never had, and even though her life at the moment with Izzie's problem looked to be in a precarious situation, shifting from side to side with her head on Derek's shoulder she forgot about everything except the man holding her. He was being so perfect, and for a moment, she just wanted to escape from there with him.

"Are you feeling hot in here? It's hot…" She said, fanning herself with her hand. "I'm just going to splash some water on my face…" She whispered in his ear huskily, her hand 'accidentally' brushing his crotch as she turned away.

Well…the sex was _great_. Being caught by Callie? Not so much. And everything fell apart after that, and she and Derek never got to discuss exactly what the prom sex meant. Meredith had been adamant that she wasn't going to do anything until the signed and processed divorce papers were in her hands, and _something_ had most definitely happened. Problem was, she didn't know what it meant either. Perhaps it was just the atmosphere, that for that moment when she was slowly dancing with Derek, all her problems didn't occupy her mind. He asked her anxiously what that sex meant, wanting to know if that was a one off thing or whether the sex ban was lifted. He had been an extremely patient man, Meredith knew how hard it must have been for him when they clearly loved each other so much.

But Meredith couldn't be that other woman. She had called Webber out on his affair with her mother, and she didn't want to be the one in the wrong for sleeping with a married man. Maybe deep down she was scared that Derek would go back to Addison again. It only took a moment to make a decision, and maybe this time, she wouldn't be chosen again. So many things happened to people who were really in love. They died, they get shot, they hide their marriages.

Derek wiped the tears from his eyes and composed himself before he got out of his car and walked towards Meredith's house, where he still saw the lights on, even though it was past eleven thirty and Meredith had to work in the morning. He exhaled deeply, and lifted the envelope from the passenger seat before walking up to the house, where Callie let him in, glaring at him. Maybe everyone expected him to chicken out again this time, not that he blamed them. George came in at the same time, and Callie hugged him, professing her love for him, and George looked up at Derek guiltily as he could bring himself to say it back.

Meredith put the final glass into the dishwasher when she heard his footsteps on the hardwood floor. She turned around to see him in the doorway,leaning against the frame as he looked at her. Meredith dried her hands on her jeans, taking a step towards him, but stopped short at the other side of the table. Meredith looked confused as she studied his face. If she wasn't mistaken, he had recently been crying, and he had an envelope in his right hand.

Derek saw her mouth open a little in shock as she noticed the envelope, and placed it on the dining table, gesturing at her to open it. She reached over and picked it up, sliding her finger along the flap and lifting out the thick wad of papers, flicking to the page that was flagged with a sticky tab, noticing the signature of both Addison and Derek confirming their divorce and settlement. Meredith's heartbeat thumped wildly in her chest, and blood rushed to her brain.

"So, what does this mean?" She asked, still processing the immensity of the moment.

Derek spoke quietly, his voice barely above a whisper. "It means you have a choice. It means you have a choice. You have a choice to make. And I don't want to rush you into making the decision before you're ready. This morning I was going to come over... I was going to say... What I wanted to say was... But now all I can say is that... I'm in love with you. I've been in love with you for, ever. I'm a little late, I know I'm a little late in telling you that. I, I just, I just want you to take your time, you know. Take all the time you need, because you have a choice to make. And when I had a choice to make, I chose wrong." His eyes had a thin film of tears covering them, that was rapidly welling up as he saw Meredith's teary expression.

Meredith was speechless as she still held the papers in her hand, the papers that ended his marriage and began a life with her. He was telling her than he finally did it, and that he didn't regret ending those eleven years with Addison. They could have had this five months ago, they could have had this this morning, and they could have it all now, and he was letting Meredith decide, give her a chance to think what she really wanted, now that she could actually have it. The words were in her head, but they couldn't come out, and she stood there, staring into his eyes in shock. It was like a dream, and any moment she would wake up. She hadn't had many of those moments that were positive one. Usually they were nightmares like her mother telling her she had Alzheimer's, or shaking Addison's hand as she introduced herself. None of them quite felt like this before, and Meredith didn't quite know what to do.

"Goodnight." Derek whispered, turning around to walk out. Maybe she just needed some time to process it all, he had all the time in the world to wait for her- as she did for him.

He had walked out of the kitchen door before he heard her. "Wait…" She croaked out quietly."It's midnight, it's too late for you to travel back to the trailer. Stay here tonight. I need you here with me."

He turned back around, walking towards her, cupping her cheek in his hand and stroking her face lightly as she put her hands inside his coat and pulled him towards her body,as they held each other tightly and kissed tenderly.

It was a new day, and for the first time in what felt like forever, they could start a new day together, without obligations to anyone else.

_**Waited a hundred years to see your face  
And I would wait a hundred more  
If only to be near you  
To have you and to hear you  
Isn't that what time is for?**_

_**Sailed a thousand ships in search of you  
Traveled to distant lands  
I dove for sunken gold  
I took what I could hold but you're  
still the greatest treasure I've held in my hands**_

_**My love, the reason I survive  
Trust we'll be together soon  
Should our fire turn to dark  
Take my heart with you**_

_**Tattered photograph my pocket holds  
I keep you secretly  
I've studied every line  
You're etched upon my mind  
For not a million soldiers could take you from me**_

_**My love, the reason i survive  
Trust we'll be together soon  
Should our fire turn to dark  
Take my heart with you**_

**The Rescues- My heart with you.**


	6. Chapter 6: Alive

**_CHAPTER 6: ALIVE._**

Derek's whole left side was going numb as he lay on his side on a cramped hospital bed, just feeling Meredith's chest rise and fall in time with his as she slept. Derek considered moving, the pins and needles in his arm becoming more painful rather than uncomfortable, but it was nothing compared to the pain he had inside when he considered how close he was to losing Meredith.

Meredith had drowned, and been medically dead. And all Derek could surmise from that was that she didn't want to swim.

Fresh tears sprung to his eyes as he thought of that, and his right hand tightened around his girlfriend, as he tried to purge those thoughts out of his mind and remember that she was alive and by his side. Derek found it hard to believe she would just have given up on swimming, she couldn't have been in the water all that long. Sure, the water was quite cold- Derek had jumped in it himself, but she couldn't have been in there for more than ten minutes before he found her, not when he knew she was a good swimmer.

"A picnic, Derek? Really?" Meredith laughed at him as she hopped out of her Jeep, walking up to him and kissing him on the lips before grabbing the blanket out of his already heavily-laden arms. He had invited her out to his land on a 'date', a way of not falling into his bad habits that he had acquired in his marriage. It didn't seem to matter that they were informally living together, that clothes they had brought over to each other's places never made it back to their respective homes. Derek's sister Nancy had just come to visit, trying to throw a spanner in the works and promptly flew back to Connecticut when she failed, and now they were enjoying some of their alone time.

"Forecast said no rain. I thought we'd take advantage of this boon…" Derek replied, smiling as Meredith linked her free arm with his, matching his strides synchronously.

Doc was happily running circles around them as they walked the short distance to a clearing by the lake, laying down the blanket before they settled down onto it. Derek sat back, resting his weight on his elbows as Meredith lay down, her head on his thighs as he handed her food and wine out of the basket. It really was the perfect day for late summer. The sun warmed their faces, but didn't burn, and Meredith never knew that silence and the occasional birdsong could be such a nice sound. They laughed and talked as Derek gave Meredith the 'abridged' version of his history of all five of his sisters on Meredith's insistence- she didn't want anymore nasty surprises.

Somehow the picnic migrated to taking their bottle of wine to the little dock on the lake, and they both sat side by side, jeans rolled up to their knees as they dangled their legs in the soothing water. "Do you think this lake is clean enough to go swimming in?" Meredith asked him suddenly.

"Have you brought a bikini?" Derek asked. He watched her raise her eyebrow, her lips curling into a naughty smile. "Ohh…skinny dipping… you'd have to be a strong swimmer to keep your head above the water."

"Swimming is about the only lesson after-school I didn't have to fight my mom on. She encouraged me to know. She told me it was her responsibility to…lemme remember the exact phrase…yeah, she told me as a seven year old it was her parental duty to 'provide me with the skills-set to achieve my full potential'…so I could save myself in case I drowned or something. So yeah, maybe I could have made the high school swim team if I had have been motivated to get up before dawn in the mornings."

Derek smiled widely, filling her glass with more wine as he held her close. Meredith was clamshell tight with details of her life most of the time, unwilling to divulge her past freely- and Derek gathered that describing her relationship with her mother as 'tumultuous' would heave been an understatement. While her childhood wasn't totally awful, it could have been better, and Derek recognised that. That's why when she offered tiny snippets of her history like she had just done, he savoured it all the more. It was as if she wouldn't open up to anyone else like Derek in those moments, and Derek felt privileged.

"Hmm…you in a skin-tight swimsuit seems so sexy. You'll have to show me those skills." Derek replied, his eyes darkening with lust, kissing her deeply.

"It's not the swimming I was worried about…but things…crawly… creepy-crawly-swimmy things live in there."

"Creepy-crawly-swimmy things? I take it you didn't take a marine biology class ever?" Derek laughed.

"Don't be an ass, Derek." Meredith laughed, playfully pushing against him, trying to push him off the dock and into the water.

The irony that Meredith was more than proficient in swimming but drowned anyway wasn't lost on him. Thoughts raced through his fatigued body as he searched from reasonable explanations as to _why_ Meredith didn't think it was worth treading water anymore. Was he not worth fighting for? Did he not provide enough support and love for her to just keep treading water forever? Derek's thumb traced her bicep up and down, as he tried to concentrate on the fact she was there.

Everything was going so well until Ellis was lucid for that day, and since then, he felt like Meredith doubted that she was allowed to be happy with the way things were going for them. Since Ellis said something to her, Meredith was waiting for something to happen- like another wife to come back, for them to hit a roadblock- find out something about each other that they found so unlikeable that they couldn't move on from that. It seemed that anything Derek said or did pissed her off even more, and Derek hadn't known how to deal with it.

Getting to know a person completely was exhausting sometimes, and he realised how much he had understood Addison over the years. He knew her- could decipher her passive-aggressiveness and behaviours, and with Meredith, he was having to start all over again. She was different to Addison, pushing him away wasn't a test to see if he'd come back stronger and _dreamier_, she really wanted him to leave her the hell alone.

He resented Ellis, she really knew how to push Meredith's buttons, and had succeeded in making Meredith doubt her relationship with Derek. All it took was for that one day of lucidity to break down nine months of what they had built together. It should have been a gift- Meredith should have been able to hear all the things she wanted her mother to say to her- that she was proud of what she had achieved, that she was happy that Meredith had found love. What kind of mother doesn't want their child to be settled in their lives. Derek realised that those little snippets Meredith told him, about not allowing her to go to every birthday party because it looked cheap among other things weren't exaggerations on Meredith's part- recollections of an overly dramatic little girl- but they were frighteningly real.

Derek knew what it was like not to have a parent- his dad had died when he was in his early teens, and he never got to say goodbye. It was too sudden for that. But he knew that if his dad could come back for a day, and talk to him, he would say how much he loved him and how he was proud of him. Meredith didn't get that at all.

Guilt swept over his body as he realised he could have contributed to Ellis's death by shouting at her when she was already in such a fragile state.

_"You broke her. You called her ordinary. You told her time and time again that nothing she does ever is good enough. Every good thing Meredith is happened to spite you. She may not survive this. That's on you. That is on you! "_

Yet Ellis was the one that didn't survive this. It was mean- Ellis was not lucid again, and she could no longer be responsible for the words she said to Meredith when she was back to her normal self. And no amount of trying to revive _that_ Grey worked. Meredith now had no one except him and her friends. Derek kissed her head lightly, careful not to wake her. He would try and be enough for her.

Meredith was screaming, but no sound was coming out- she was trying to kick, but her legs wouldn't move and her lungs were filling up with ice cold water. The surface of the water was getting further and further away as she sank deeper and deeper…and she closed her eyes. She couldn't _watch_ herself die. If only this were a nightmare of fantasy instead of reliving a real life experience.

She wished she had fought harder to keep her head above water, but she just didn't have the energy anymore. She had accepted it was her time to go. She had been treading water for what felt like forever, and her muscles were cramping in the cold water. Every breath she took hurt, and no one could hear her cries for help. There had to be a point where she gave up, and she had reached it. It wasn't that she _wanted_ to die…it was just that she had run out of energy to fight to live. Derek would have forgiven her for that eventually.

Ellis had called her ordinary, nothing special, nothing to be proud of after not being there for her for five years. Meredith wasn't sure if anything she did would have been good enough for her, and Meredith had been thinking about it overnight, and had begun to believe her. Her mother's Alzheimer's hadn't motivated her- she had lost that force that had driven her to get to where she was. Meredith had been happy exactly where she was, and Ellis had ruined all that in one day.

It wasn't that Meredith had tried to drown herself in that tub- she just wanted to see if she had it in her to be able to push herself to the limits- whether she still had that ability to compete with her own expectations of herself. So she held her breath underwater. She could do thirty seconds…up to forty… the lightheaded-ness she had felt due to the lack of oxygen had felt somewhat numbing in the warm water of the tub- and in a good way. She was pushing herself, and it felt great. She hadn't lost it, she could be passionate, a force of nature…

And then Derek spoiled it by pulling her out of the tub.

He wouldn't understand it. She wasn't trying to hurt herself, she was re-learning how to push herself, and she felt like only she would understand the difference. He was pushing and pushing her to tell him what happened between her and Ellis- but she couldn't. Even though her relationship with Ellis was less than picture-postcard, she still had this instinctual desire to defend her. She could say what she wanted about Ellis, but Derek couldn't. How could she tell Derek anything when she hadn't figured out what it all meant in her head yet?

He had almost proposed to her.

Meredith hadn't known what she had really thought about that, but said no anyway. If in doubt, say no. Marriage was far out of her mind until he mentioned it. But if he wanted to…she wouldn't have opposed it. Being ordinary to her mother was nothing new- that was normal Ellis, even when she was with it. Nothing was ever good enough. If Meredith had accepted the fact she was only ordinary, then so should Ellis.

But Meredith had died.

The ketamine neurotransmitters they were pumping into her transported her into this screwed up afterlife, where she had met her mother, and her mother tried to build those bridges Meredith had hoped to build during that day of lucidity.

_"Just keep going. Don't be a dam. You are anything but ordinary, Meredith."_

She wasn't ordinary. She had been waiting all thirty-three years of her life to hear that from her mother, and even if it was all in her head, it's what she needed to hear. She was enough for her mother, she had to learn from her mother's mistakes. She couldn't be like her mother and be too scared to fight for whom and what she loved- and she loved Derek. Derek, the man who believed in soulmates and love and magic, even though he had been through a divorce, his wife cheated with his best friend, his dad died- now Meredith happened to him.

Just how 'killing' Ellis by not sanctioning her heart operation would have been yet 'another thing' to happen to Meredith, she couldn't let her death be another thing for Derek. She had to be strong, fight back, be there for him. And so she ran, ran as fast as she could, towards that blinding light faster and faster….

Meredith was jolted awake by her dream of reliving her afterlife experience, her heart racing as she heard it throbbing in her ears, breathing deeply to try and catch her breath. Her hand with the drip and the pulse ox went straight to her chest, and within seconds, she felt Derek's strong hand cover it.

Derek's eyes popped open as he felt her move suddenly beside her. In his daze, he feared it could have been a seizure, until he heard her anguished sigh, and despite the pins and needles, shifted closer towards her, spooning her more, holding her tighter than before, so he was against every inch of her body.

"You're ok, you're alright…" Derek whispered soothingly in her ear over and over until she had calmed down.

"What time is it? Don't leave me." Meredith asked him groggily, wrapping her sore fingers around his, as he held his hand against her heart, feeling it beat rhythmically inside her chest.

"It's midnight. Go to sleep. You need your rest. I'll be right here when you wake up." Derek croaked, glad that Meredith was facing the same way as him, so she couldn't see the tears in his eyes, rolling down his cheeks.

He was there for her, just like Denny had said he would be- soulmates. He would have had to believe in one hell of a magic trick to get them out of this, but they could do it. Meredith had wanted to tell him everything, but that had crossed the border from magic to plain crazy. She'd tell him another time. She always had another day. Not today.

**_Tonight the stars fill the sky_**

**_And each one shines upon me_**

**_Couldn't help but remind me of my dreams_**

**_So I sing myself a lullaby_**

**_Though I'm alone I don't cry_**

**_And I wonder why_**

**_When the rain comes down_**

**_And there's no one else around_**

**_When I'm feeling down I need you to_**

**_Catch me when I, catch me when I fall_**

**_Life without you ain't no fun at all_**

**_Believe me when I, hear me when I call_**

**_Nights without you_**

**_It ain't the same at all_**

**_Catch me when I'm wrong but I think I'm right_**

**_Catch me when I'm just looking for fight_**

**_And hear me out when you think my sanity's in doubt_**

**_Hear me when I need you and _**

**_I'll catch you when you, I'll catch you when you fall_**

**_Life without you ain't no fun at all_**

**_And believe me when I, I'll hear you when you call_**

**_Nights without you…_**

**_Catch me when I, catch me when I fall_**

**_Life without you ain't no fun at all_**

**_And believe me when I, I'll hear you when you call_**

**_Nights without you_**

**_It ain't the same at all_**

**Daniel Cage- Catch me when I fall.**


	7. Chapter 7: 48 Hours

CHAPTER 7: 48 HOURS

_**CHAPTER 7: 48 HOURS.**_

Derek and Meredith were still together- barely- but still together. Things were just spiralling deeper and deeper into this pit of despair, like Meredith was being sucked into a vortex of crap that was her life, and Derek didn't know if he could hold on any longer. He didn't know if he wanted to. The more bad things that happened to her, the more she closed up, and all Derek wanted to do was to be there for her.

Maybe they needed a change of scenery. That's why he was looking up cute little bed and breakfast inns in the wine county instead of doing his paperwork. Napa or Sonoma? Kitschy little inn or more luxurious hotel? Maybe if he took her away from Seattle, away from the new sister and drunken father, away from the memories that Seattle had held for her, they could get back on track, she could open up and actually tell him what her drowning _actually_ meant for her.

Every time he tried to ask, she tried to distract him with sex, and the thing that annoyed him most about it all- was that nearly every time it worked. His brain was screaming no, but his body screamed yes, and Meredith really knew all the right things to do to make his brain scream yes in no time too. She knew that spot right in front of his ear, if she applied the right amount of pressure with her tongue, would virtually launch him off the bed in a pleasure that rocked his whole body. Maybe Derek relented because he felt like that was Meredith's way of opening up to him- and not just in the obvious, crude way- but he could see it in her eyes, as she was nearing her peak and just after- he watched for it- that moment where her eyes suddenly 'opened' and relayed all those emotions she had never verbalised, how that moment took all the pain away that she had accrued over the past few months.

But maybe that was wishful thinking. Maybe he was imagining it, because no sooner did the post-coital calm dissipate into the air, so did Meredith's openness, and he could almost feel her harden up again, put up those emotional barriers he couldn't break down. He was running out of things to say or do that he thought would make her better. He was exhausted searching for that breakthrough, that something that would make her crack, and just _TALK._

_Tell him, Meredith. Just tell him. Be brave and say all the things you're scared to say. Just talk to him._

Meredith sighed as she bit her lip, arguing with that voice in her head that told her to tell Derek about everything- about that weird place that she went to in her head when she was 'dead' about how devastated she was that her second-chance, fake mommy had died right in front of her, and how much Cristina's almost-wedding had affected her. How she vowed to herself that if Cristina could do it, so could she. Except Cristina couldn't do it, and now Meredith didn't have any faith that she could either.

If she told him everything she felt, it might have been too much for him, and he would just run away. Then she would have opened up her heart to him, and he would have stomped all over it. Meredith could remember that time at the carousel, where her mother begged and begged Richard Webber to pick her…and he didn't. She had her heart stomped all over, and if there was one thing Meredith couldn't do, it would be to turn into her mother. She would give up Derek a hundred times to avoid that. She ignored the voice in her head that told her if she didn't tell Derek how she felt, there was a greater chance she _would_ end up like her mother. But it was just too hard.

She had agreed to the forty- eight uninterrupted hours with Derek, and now she had swapped shifts with Alex, she was actually looking forward to it. No moving out of the bed, only her and Derek. There was no pesky sister she didn't know how to know, there wasn't any of her mother's ghost following her in her house or in the hospital. There wasn't any of those terrible memories of being blown up by a bomb, or having her father slap her…or being dead. Maybe in a different setting, outside of Seattle where it was only her and Derek- she would have the courage to open up to him.

In some ways, Meredith was frustrated with herself. She remembered how she felt after the bomb, wondering what was the point of nearly dying if it didn't change anything- if it didn't make Derek come back to her. But it did. Derek did come back to her, he did make a decision, and he chose her. But this time, maybe actually dying was emotionally too much for both of them. They were on different sides of the same story, and bridging the gap between the two was proving very difficult. Both of them were waiting for the other person to make the first move, and this stalemate situation was really wearing them down.

Meredith tried to tell him it was different for her, that the only way she could deal with it was to look at it positively, but really, Meredith wasn't good at talking through her problems, and preferred to suffer silently, trying to convince people she was just _fine_. But truth was- everyone needed someone to fall apart to, and even though she wanted that person to be Derek, and Derek wanted to be that person, she was scared to give him that privilege, because if it all got too much for him, she couldn't lose him.

She was going to tell him. Truly. She was going to tell him sometime in bed in the wine country, where she had gotten him so exhausted that he would be too tired to freak out about her experiences in 'Mergatory'… where after a marathon of sex he'd mumble something comforting like _'no Mer, you're not a freak, I still love you'_ rollover, and go to sleep. It was a long-shot, but it was all she had. Meredith signed charts mindlessly as she thought about the situation she found herself in with Derek. She should have just told him about it right away, when it was still real, when she felt like she still had a second chance, because now she had come back to life, she realised that this second go was just more of the same crap, and now she had lost her courage to tell him. It was on the tip of her tongue so many times, and she just couldn't say it.

Everything she had experienced- Denny, Dylan, Bonnie, Liz Fallon- even Ellis… it was all in her mind. It wasn't a reality, and how could she base her life on her hallucination? Her brain was high. What she knew for real was that Derek flirted with her sister she never met, her dad wished she never existed, her best friend's fairytale imploded. Nothing about that was clear, happy, simple, and at the moment-that forty eight uninterrupted hours with Derek was the only bright spot on her otherwise dismally dark horizon.

Two days, alone with Derek in the wine country.

Her little slice of heaven.

It didn't matter that lately every time they were together there was this uncomfortably tense atmosphere that hung between them- where the unspoken words and feelings dragged them down. Because for once, they were going to be _that_ couple. That couple who goes on mini-breaks and comes back Monday morning with an oversexed grin on their faces, that couple whose grins and loved-up-ness was infectious. They weren't going to highlight the damage that they carried around with them everyday. It was going to be room-service and nakedness. Maybe if she didn't feel like Meredith Grey, she would stop acting like her, and tell Derek everything he needed to here. No banner of avoidance.

Meredith just had a little bit more to go, the horror of having to look after Grandpa Intern and having her ass chewed out by Mark seeming insignificant blips on her otherwise glorious plans for the weekend. She dumped the charts into the trolley, and walked down the hallway, smiling as she saw Derek in his coat and holding his bag as he punched the button for the elevator.

"Hey,I got Alex to cover for me. So, I just have to round on my patients and then I can leave. 48 uninterrupted hours." She grinned, her arm touching his lightly.

Derek looked shocked for a second as his eyes fell to the spot where her fingers had brushed his arm. His eyes widened a little and by the time he looked up, he had managed to cover up that look of shock.

" Yeah. Yeah. Um... maybe this isn't a good idea." Derek backtracked.

Meredith knew that voice. That was his diplomatic surgeon voice that he used when he didn't want to upset someone…which kinda pissed her off even more. She took a moment to think about why he would renege on his offer of a weekend of sex, and then she realised that he worked with Lexie today. The brighter, shinier, less damaged version of herself. He flirted with her in a bar once. Maybe he decided she was easier to cope with than Meredith. Maybe she spoke about her feelings, whereas Meredith didn't. Perhaps he only had a thing about bright-eyed impressionable interns, and once they became jaded second-year residents with a ton of issues he wasn't interested any more.

"What'd Lexie say about me?" Meredith inquired, perhaps a little more aggressively than she had intended.

Derek frowned, answering defensively. "She didn't say anything. I did all the talking. Oh, don't blame her."

He saw it in her eyes, lighting up with annoyance as he defended her sister. He just wanted her to know that now there was someone there for her who was more than just some random friend. If she wanted to, there was a meaningful relationship with Lexie that Meredith had lacked in her life. No one would have flown all the way over to the other side of the country for less than a day like Nancy had done. Just because she was worried about him. Given time and work on both sides, Meredith and Lexie could have had that, Derek really had believed that. And even if Meredith hadn't realised that yet, Derek could do the ground work and pave an easier path for Meredith when she did decide to have a relationship with her half-sister.

But yet again, Meredith had her wires ever so slightly crossed, and Derek realised exactly how alone Meredith had been before. "So, what? You're friends with my sister now? I mean, you talk to the other Grey, about me."

Derek sighed frustratedly, running his hand over his face and through his hair. He was just looking out for her, and she was taking it the wrong way. How could they go on a long weekend break like this?  
**"**You know what I talked about with the other Grey? All the things this Grey won't let me say."

He cringed internally as he said it, knowing exactly what to say to provoke her, but at that moment, he was desperate. He was on his last nerve. He needed to say _something _to make her talk. It was such a cheap shot, playing into all her securities, and for the first time in a long time, he felt like an asshole. Last time he felt this bad and manipulative was when he was stringing both her and Addison along. He was playing on her every insecurity.

**"**You can say anything to me." Meredith argued.

In that moment, she really believed that he really _could_ say anything to her. She wanted to be able to hear everything he said to her. Maybe she couldn't, but she'd try. She prepared herself for what he was going to say to her. Maybe he would tell her that he wanted her to talk about everything that had happened over the past few months, and then she'd tell him that she would this weekend.

Derek paused, preparing himself. This was his chance to tell her how he felt, what he wanted from her, from this relationship. He was tired of subtly alluding to his desires for the future, he was taking his chance to lay it all out on the table. It may have only seemed like a split second for him to decide what to say to her, but he had been dreaming about it for a long time. He had replayed this moment over and over in his mind, and now, he was going to really tell her what he wanted, deep from his heart.

" I want to marry you. I want to have kids with you. I want to build us a house. I want to settle down and grow old with you. I want to die when I'm 110 years old in your arms. I don't want 48 uninterrupted hours. I want a lifetime."

Meredith stepped back in shock, trying to blink out the tingles that raced through her body as Derek finished his speech. She wasn't expecting such a heartfelt out-pouring of his feelings. She thought he'd say that he wanted her to talk to him about things, or something less… permanent that forever. Because really, Meredith wasn't sure if she believed in forever. She'd never seen it, and when she thought she could have it with Derek, Addison showed up. She had nearly died twice. What if her 'forever' lasted until only tomorrow? Meredith wasn't really able to think past the next two days.

" Mm-hmm..." She choked out.

"Do you see what happens? I say things like that, and you fight the urge to run in the opposite direction. It's okay. I understand. I didn't, but now I do. I do... You're just getting started, and I've been doing this for a long time. Deep down, you're still an intern. And you're not ready."

He was pushing her, and pushing her hard. But maybe if he made this as close to an ultimatum as he could, he could kick-start her into talking to him. But now the floodgates had opened, and he had told her his aspirations in his relationship with her, it made him realise _how_ _much_ he wanted all of that. He was forty, he had been in a marriage that, on retrospect, wasn't everything he really wanted. He wanted more. And he wasn't sure how much he wanted that lifestyle or how much he wanted Meredith. Derek waited expectantly. Waiting for her to say something, to either jump in or jump out. Surely there must have been someone somewhere who wanted everything Derek wanted. Sure- Derek loved her- but sometimes love isn't enough. He thought he loved Addison, and that Addison loved him back equally, yet she still cheated on him, she still decided sleeping with Mark was worth more than her marriage. Even though there was love- relationships needed more than that, some relationships just didn't endure that strain, and with Meredith and him- there was more strain than in most. He didn't want to _be_ with Meredith and feel unfulfilled. Sex and Mockery wouldn't be enough forever. That wasn't a healthy, enduring relationship.

Meredith took a deep breath. "I'm not ready right now. But things could stay the way they are, and I can get ready. I'll get ready."

Incremental little steps. That Meredith could manage. If she wanted this to work- for this to last- then she couldn't just lie and tell him she one hundred percent wanted that too. Wanting it, and believing you really could have it were two very different things in her mind. She had so much to fix in herself before she was ready to be married to Derek. Wasn't it enough that she was exclusive with him, that she only wanted to be with him? She was in no position to be accepting his fake proposal if she couldn't open up to him. She was really getting ready to, but she needed some more time.

Was Derek ready to give it to her?

In that moment, neither of them were sure. Derek deflated as the pseudo-rejection stung him. He pushed, and she fell over. He wanted to be enough for her, to be the one for her, and he could see there was _something_ holding her back from being completely in this. Now he had said it, he couldn't go back on it. Derek hated the way things were in that moment. There was no communication, just sex, and he didn't want that. He didn't mind that Meredith had a tough year, he just wanted her to talk about it, because right now, he felt like he was literally breathing for her, and he wasn't sure if he could keep breathing for her anymore.

"Ok…" Derek relented, shaking his head. "I'm going to the trailer." He told her, before giving her a longing look to make her say some sort of magic words to fix this, but they never came. He sighed in defeat as he turned around just as the elevator doors opened. His eyes were fixed on her sadly as the doors closed, as Meredith continued to stand there in shock.

The mini-break was a step, and Derek took it back. They had never been out of Seattle together before, and she had wanted that. Who was she kidding? They were the ones that carried their emotional baggage around with them, and these unspoken issues that they had, beginning from the moment Addison appeared would follow them both around everywhere they went. She was too late in opening up to him, and now he was closing off.

Meredith began the short journey home, replaying that scene in front of the elevator over and over in her mind. She wondered how it ended up going where it went. She turned into her street, seeing George's car parked in the driveway, and the dim light from the front room diffusing out of the window. Meredith knew the wine country retreat wouldn't be happening this weekend, but she could still have the forty eight uninterrupted hours. Maybe she had to earn that mini-break. She was about to turn into her driveway, but instead made a sharp u-turn. She had to tell Derek that she wasn't going to give up. This time, she had to be the one to be there.

She knocked on the door to his trailer with three strong raps, making the metal door vibrate. She had to do this now, while the adrenaline was pumping through her veins. He opened the door, surprised to see her there. He was in his pajamas, his hair drying from a recent shower, as it was beginning to curl at the ends.

"I know it's late… like midnight late… but… it's a step Derek. The forty-eight hours uninterrupted thing…it's a step. It's a lame, stupid, pathetic attempt for me to believe this. It's not the wine country thing, it's the time thing Derek. You know?" Meredith blurted out, as she tried to catch her breath. "Remember when I was dead? Before I went in that water everything was so ... complicated. Hard. And then you pulled me out of the water ... and I came back to life. For a moment everything was so clear. As if the water had washed everything clean. Do you remember that?"

Derek winced as Meredith mentioned the day she drowned. He jumped a little in shock as she said those words. They never talked about it, about what it meant for them, because just thinking about it was painful. "I do." He replied in a reverent tone.

"Me too. And… that feeling I had…it goes away. That feeling like I can do anything, that clarity…it went away. And now I'm back to being the coward who can't tell you how I feel… I died Derek. I know you know, that you experienced it too, but it was different for me. It made me realise that… I have you. I want time. At the moment, all I can give is forty eight hours… of just us. But if you believe we'll live till 110, then we have all the time in the world. But right now… we can spend two midnights together in each other's arms. And that's special too."

Derek moved closer towards her, capturing her hand in his. "Anytime with you is special, Meredith." He whispered. "I'll meet your two midnights…and I'll go all out to actually talking to each other before we explode like this in the future, OK?"

Meredith's eyebrow arched high, as she smirked in mock scepticism. "Are you betting on us? Is this a game of poker?"

Meredith teased him, falling into the flirtiness she knew. She didn't tell him everything, but that was something, and it just might have been enough. For now. And she'd give as much as she could, in the hope Derek would accept it, and they'd just live in this happy dysfunction. That's what they did best.

"Strip poker…" Derek mumbled against her neck.

"I'll raise you…" Meredith giggled suggestively.

"You already have." He laughed, picking her up and taking her to the bed where they began their weekend together as the bedside clock turned midnight. Forty eight uninterrupted hours of this.

************************

_**Pain takes my heart's place.  
The love we made, we can't erase it.  
Don't want to face it.**_

Pitterpat, the angel on my shoulder is haunting me tonight.  
Tick-tock, the clock is getting louder, ready for me to decide.

I've lost my sense of right and wrong,  
When justified, my soul to carry on.  
I feel so damn good to write off the rules,  
but when a new day breaks, I'm left a fool.  
I'm such a fool.

Pain takes my heart's place,  
Your sweet, sweet love,  
I can taste it,  
But still can't face it.

Pitterpat, the angel on my shoulder is haunting me tonight.  
Tick-tock, the clock is getting louder, ready for me to decide.  
The angel on my shoulder is haunting me tonight.  
Tick-tock, the clock is getting louder, ready for me to decide.

The sun is coming down on me;  
Could fate be so unkind?

Pain takes my heart's place.  
The love we made remains.

Pitterpat, the angel on my shoulder is haunting me tonight.  
Tick-tock, the clock is getting louder, ready for me to decide.  
The angel on my shoulder is haunting me tonight.  
Tick-tock, the clock is getting louder, ready for me to decide.

**Erin McCarley-Pitterpat.**


	8. Chapter 8: Why?

_**CHAPTER 8: WHY?**_

_Why?_

Meredith had asked herself that question a few times in her life, at defining moments, and right now was one of them. She felt the whoosh of the scrub room door slamming as Derek had stormed out. They had lost yet another patient, of a clinical trial she had dreamed up.

After Derek's fake proposal, and his desire for a forever with her, Meredith had decided to explore _why_ she couldn't really make the steps to even being close to that. She had hung out with Cristina one night when Derek had an emergency page, and they had sat on Cristina's bed, pouring over psych books, trying to find a reason for Meredith's commitment-phobia. A part of her really wanted it, knowing that her mother was never able to have it, and part of her didn't know how to have it. She didn't understand how it was easy for her to learn facts and new surgical skills everyday, but she couldn't learn how to be in a healthy relationship with Derek. Wanting it and having it were different things.

Derek was being good at taking it at the speed she wanted it to go at, but she could see that he wouldn't be able to contain his impatience forever. What if it came to a point where settling down became more important than Meredith? What if he didn't mind compromising her for a woman who wanted the house, who wasn't scared of being with one person until they were 110? Meredith didn't even know how to be with someone for 110 days without freaking out. He'd find a nice girl, who wanted everything he did, and she had to figure out _why _she wasn't already there.

The issues were too much for the psych textbook and Cristina, and Meredith took it to heart when Cristina half-jokingly suggested she go see a shrink:

"Meredith!" Cristina groaned, reaching for a pillow to put over her head. "I cant help you any more! According to this book, the differentials could be… anxiety disorder, depression, personality disorder, abandonment issues… I think you should go see a shrink or something. I'm a surgeon, not a psych loser."

"Psych is crap!" Meredith cried, waving her hand in the air to emphasise her point. "I don't have a _disorder_…" but then again, she did have some kind of problem, and it didn't matter what it was, she needed to be given the tools to fix it.

And that was why she was sitting in Dr. Wyatt's office, not speaking for three sessions. Surgery was easy compared to this- you have a tumor? Cut it out. Her whole childhood and adolescence was like a big, huge life compromising tumor, and it was much harder to cut that out and still live to see another day. Just sitting there was helping her, right? Maybe she was fooling her brain into thinking she was healing without letting a stranger know exactly how fucked up she was.

She had wanted to tell Derek she was seeking some kind of psychiatric help, she wasn't comfortable keeping it from him, but every time she opened her mouth to tell him, the words refused to come out. It was like she became involuntarily mute every single time, then she smiled, then he smiled, then they kissed…and did it in an on call room, or storage closet. She hated that she was still using the sex as an emotional crutch, and hated even more that she had only given Derek _just_ enough to keep him satisfied in terms of opening up- she hadn't said anything more since that night about anything- anything in her childhood, anything about her drowning, and they'd been living in the hope that there was a potential for Meredith to talk eventually.

Derek deserved more. She deserved more.

'_You're ordinary. You're only just ordinary' _ a voice in the back of her head kept telling her.

Meredith had honestly started believing that. She WAS just ordinary. Her mother had told her time and time again that anything less than being the best was a failure, but being just mediocre-ordinary was far worse- and she couldn't seem to succeed at anything. At least failing meant that you were _trying_, which was better than doing nothing at all. Meredith was convincing herself that she was trying with Derek- but was she really? She hadn't told him about her experiences while she was drowned, she didn't tell him how she had never had a Halloween, or that she recently 'scattered' her mother's ashes down the scrub room sink.

That fight to prove to herself and that voice that she wasn't ordinary culminated in researching and initiating this clinical trial. It was meant to save lives, give people second chances- she knew how much one of those was worth- but instead, she was just sending them to an early death. Derek and she were killing people by injecting viruses into their brains. They were failing- miserably. Maybe her mother was wrong. Failing felt _FAR_ worse than not trying. She had forced him to agree to this trial- she knew it was a long shot, Derek would never have done it if is wasn't her that was asking him- she was pushing him, maybe because he was pushing her, and right now, they were pushing away from each other again. There were times where Meredith thought that they should just stop this trial. She should stop hiding behind the great big metaphor of it all, and just talk to him- drink most of a bottle of tequila and really be honest with him. But then that would make them even more of a failure, and that would cause them to break.

_Why?_

Why did he allow Meredith to twist his arm into doing this trial in which there was no hope for success? Why was he transferring the strain he felt in their relationship onto the trial? To him certainly he felt like if he was not successful in the trial, and he had to abandon it, his relationship with Meredith may die with it too.

Derek stormed out of the scrub room, the sound of the flat tone of the monitor signalling asystole still ringing in his ears, haunting him. Another death. Derek was growing impatient, and not just with the lack of success in the trial. He stopped at the board, angrily wiping the surgery off the board-Malignant Glioma: Dr D. Shepherd. Malignant- that's what this trial was on his life. Just as it was taking away his patient's time, it was taking his time away too. Meredith had promised him that they had time together- and she hadn't opened up to him. He just wanted to know things about her- and not all at once, but just little snippets on the way to work, or at lunch, or at any one of their rendezvouses.

When Meredith had turned up at his trailer, he had hope they had turned the corner, and had faith that they would last the distance, but something had changed. Meredith's lunchtimes were taken up with 'appointments' and Derek had really wanted to ask what they were for. As each patient died, the distance between Meredith and Derek grew. He felt as if failing a patient was failing Meredith. She had trusted him with this trial to make it succeed, and with every patient that didn't make it, maybe her view of him was becoming less and less too. The McDreamy neurosurgeon was no more, and now he just killed people.

Being with Meredith and working so closely with her was creating too much pressure. Derek found himself not 'looking' at other women, but noticing them. Perhaps he would have been better off with someone who didn't know so much, someone like that scrub nurse who kept smiling at him- maybe she wouldn't have been as much hard work as Meredith had. He was really trying hard to go at Meredith's pace- his reasoning being some Meredith was better than no Meredith at all. She was like his drug-he knew she may not have been the best thing for him, but in some kind of way she made him feel better. She was right. He lived for those moments where it was just him and her, and no one else. Nothing else mattered. No one understood each other like they did. That seemed like a contradiction sometimes, because there were instances where he felt like he didn't understand Meredith AT ALL. He wished he could get inside her mind and hear all the things she had wanted to say but didn't in fear of rejection.

Ellis was a terrible mother. He had realised that much from that day of lucidity- that terrible day that had set Meredith back months. Nothing Meredith did was good enough for her mother, and if she had said anything, it was immediately shot down. The only reason he agreed to this trial was because he couldn't be another person close to her who didn't believe in her and her abilities. Except now, his need to show her that she could do it was making him not believe in himself, to doubt his abilities. And despite that- despite the fact her mother was terrible to her, that he had originally chosen his wife instead of her- Meredith had remained fiercely faithful to both of them. She had not told anyone except Derek about her mother's condition until she turned up at the hospital- despite her mother telling her she wasn't good enough time and time again. Ellis hadn't deserved Meredith's loyalty in the slightest- and wouldn't have even had a clue if Meredith had made an announcement in the New England Journal of Medicine about her Alzheimer's. Meredith had taken him back, after he had decided to try again with his wife, even though he probably didn't deserve it, and any lesser person would never have trusted him again. And now, to thank her, he was killing people with her. He was taking her theory and disproving it time and time again. He was no better than Ellis- he was making her feel like a failure too. And that guilt was too much to bear.

Meredith didn't know where they were going wrong. They were using that magic connection they shared with each other- that special ability to communicate through the slightest changes in their eyes to inject the virus into the tumor in synchrony with each other- even though there was no success, they still had that spark between them, and that was the only reason Meredith had hoped. Not even killing people had killed that connection. If they could do this- if they could have one patient who lived- Meredith knew she and Derek could survive anything. A rational part of Meredith wanted to slap herself silly. How could she base the whole future of her relationship on the success of a risky trial? Derek and she had been through so much more than this- they had come back from the brink of her death, from the death of her step-mother whom she was just starting to get close to, and all the other crap, and this was the deciding factor for her- to trust him to tell him everything.

She had just come out of a session with Dr. Wyatt. She had started talking now, because she had come to the conclusion that if she talked, Wyatt would provide her with the tools to make this trial- and her relationship with Derek- a success. She had said that Meredith had no regard for her life, which Meredith thought was bullshit. She respected her life a lot- considering she had nearly lost it. But that didn't mean that she should recklessly open up to people because she nearly died.

Meredith was still reeling from her appointment as she was paged to see the chief. He was another person that she had to contend with- both professionally and personally. Meredith wondered _why_ all the lines in her life seemed so blurred- she was having a sexual relationship with her boss, her new sister was here as an intern, she was the intern on her step-mother's case, she lived with her fellow residents, and her chief of surgery was her mothers mistress… or whatever… he was the one that made her mother become the Ellis Meredith knew, he was the one that made Meredith unable to commit to Derek. And it was about to get worse.

She jogged up to the older man, and slowed to a stop as the older man turned around and smiled at her in a greeting, as she tried to catch her breath. The smile- it wasn't a completely friendly one. It was one of consolation, and Meredith wasn't sure if the palpitations were because she had just run up three flights of stairs of because she had a feeling. And nothing good came of those.

"You wanted to see me?" Meredith sighed, trying to prepare herself for whatever was coming.

"Ah, yeah. I got a phone call from the IRB- the national board that oversees and reviews clinical trials. You've had eleven deaths, they're giving you one last patient. You get today, under the wire and hope for the best. At midnight, if you lose them, they're going to shut you down. Period. One last patient." The chief explained before turning around and heading back into the pit for a trauma.

Meredith looked at Webber's back, watching him round the corner as she stood there speechless. _Why_ did that man take important things away from her time and time again? In that moment, she had never hated him more than she did now. If he had chosen her mother, Meredith was sure Ellis would have been a different person- the mother she had always dreamed of- Richard would have brought her some perspective, that there was more to life than her career. Because of him, Ellis was heartbroken- which she never had recovered from. Because of Richard Webber, she was denied months with Derek. If he hadn't have invited Addison to Seattle, meddled in Derek's marital disharmony, Derek would have told Meredith about Addison that night and just signed the papers. Now he was taking away this trial- her chance to show her and Derek that they could go through a period of trial and error, but were successful at the end.

One more surgery, two more patients. No matter how much you worked the math, it was impossible to juggle. Meredith would just have to lie, bend the rules. She had to make this work. She was still a little stunned about the ultimatum as she wondered around trying to find Derek to tell him. Derek had had a pep talk with her just four days before- when another patient had died.

She had been sitting on the bed in an empty patient room, trying to pull herself together, not willing to let anyone see her fall apart about this. To everyone else, it was just a trial- it hadn't got anything to do with her relationship with Derek, even though the reality was that they were both intricately entwined in one another. Meredith heard the door open and someone step into the room. It was Derek, she could feel it. She was glad she had her back to the wall, wiping her tears from her face, breathing in as deeply as she could through her stuffy nose. He was telling her it was encephalitis, he was hiding his emotions with the science of it all, but Meredith could hear that shaky uncertainty in his voice. He was hurting as much as she was.

In that moment, Meredith had another pang of painful self doubt. "I never should have said I could handle it. I shouldn't have let you go." Shouldn't have let him go home, shouldn't have let him grow distant after she drowned. She shouldn't have let him go back to his wife. She shouldn't have let him go emotionally by keeping all her feelings inside of herself.

"You did everything right" Derek reassured her.

She turned round at his words, trusting to show him her emotions at his encouragement. He knew she had been crying, but he saw her puffy eyes and tear streaked cheeks, and he entered further into the room to sit on the bed beside her.

"You did everything I would have done. On my way here I stopped and I got this…" Derek told her, pulling a bottle of champagne out of his coat. "For when we get it right."

They were close, Meredith knew that. She just needed to work out what that final push was- she had come such a long way- she was actually admitting issues to herself now instead of fervently denying them and just covering them up inside. Celebrate when they get it right.

"Because we will. We will succeed. We will save someone. When we do, we're gonna open this bottle of champagne and we're going to drink to Philip Robinson, and Darren Covington, and all the other patients who helped us change the face of medicine- we're gonna celebrate, we're going to use this as our victory dance. Meredith- we will- we are going to open this bottle of champagne."

Meredith smiled ruefully through her tears, wanting so desperately to believe Derek who was giving her his empowering speech. She could do it- she may have had a lot of work in front of her, but all was not lost. That's when she started talking to Dr. Wyatt in her appointments. Because she wanted to open that bottle with Derek.

He had told her they were bending the rules without breaking them.

And that's what she was doing with Derek. Not completely breaking up with him because of her inability to believe she could have a meaningful relationship, but putting an unbearable strain on him. How could she worry about her interactions with another person when she hadn't even figured herself out yet? They failed time and time again, and still Derek was coming back for more- they had killed Jeremy, and now they were going to kill another one. One big fat fail.

Maybe if Meredith could work out _why_ her mother decided to slash herself with a scalpel when Meredith was five, then Meredith could fix that part of herself that planted the seed of damage. She would be able to kill it off at the roots and move on. She had made one revelation- her mother never wanted to seriously kill herself. It was a cry for attention from the one person she craved it from, but never asked. Meredith couldn't be like that. She was a passionate force of nature, that's what Ellis brought her up to be, and not just in her professional life. She wanted Meredith to fight for what she wanted in life, not to be scared. She wanted her to _tell_ the love of her life that he was exactly that- and make no apologies for it. Ellis wanted her to balance home and work, and be happy with the compromise.

_Be extraordinary, Meredith._

Ellis settled with being alone. Meredith couldn't settle. She would never settle, and that's why, on the back of the success of Beth's surgery, she was standing on Derek's land, waiting for him- calling him- and waiting for him to come back. She had proved, with Derek, that they could be extraordinary together rather than ordinary apart. She was showing him how much she wanted the future, that even though it may have been scary, she was going to communicate, because if you didn't trust anyone, you'd end up alone, and unhappy.

The pop of the champagne cork rang in her ears as some of the foam dribbled onto the grass. Everything after her cheesy speech and house made of candles on his cliff seemed trivial- but this time alone together and healthier than they had been for a long time brought some much needed quiet time between the couple. Derek brought the bottle to Meredith's lips, letting her take a swig before he did the same, smiling widely.

Derek got a call from the hospital, and Meredith knew what was being said from the way his whole demeanour lifted even higher. "It's midnight." Meredith said simply, smiling as she took the bottle out of his hands, reciprocating his earlier gesture as she poured some of the alcohol down his throat.

"Beth's still alive. We did it, Meredith." Derek replied, hugging her tightly. "We succeeded. We got through the failure and the hard times, and we're still here."

"Tonight has been extraordinary." Meredith laughed as Derek lifted her up with ease, spinning her round on their candle blueprint of their future together.

*************

**_With everything I've ever done  
I'd give it all to everyone for one more day  
Another night I'm waking through  
Another door I walk into  
I can't break_**

**_It's a winding road  
It's a long way home_**

**_So don't wait for someone to tell you it's too late  
'Cause these are the best days  
There's always something tomorrow  
So I say let's make the best of tonight  
Here comes the rest of our lives_**

**_I count the steps the distance to  
The time when it was me and you is so far gone  
Another face another friend  
Another place another end but I'll hang on_**

**_It's a winding road  
It's a long way home_**

**_So don't wait for someone to tell you it's too late  
'Cause these are the best days  
There's always something tomorrow  
So I say let's make the best of tonight  
Yeah let's make the best of tonight  
Here comes the rest of our lives_**

******Graham Colton- Best Days.**


	9. Chapter 9: Baby Steps

_**CHAPTER 9: BABY STEPS.**_

Meredith flopped onto the bed, and felt Derek join her as she sighed in exhaustion. She felt Derek's hand reach for hers that lay limply on the bed. She looked over as he turned on his side, smiling at her through tired eyes as his lips puckered up for an easy kiss. Easy. For once it felt like it might be. Suddenly neither of them felt that fatigued by the packing anymore as clothes were peeled off bodies and dropped onto the floor.

Afterward, they both lay there in a _real_ exhaustion, enjoying the silence- the lack of need to say anything to each other in that moment. Meredith was thinking- looking back to how momentous this day was, and how much she had achieved in moving forward in her life. That day, she had asked a boy to move in with her, and even though she was quite scared that she had done that, she hadn't let the fear consume her and push him away. Earlier, she had the urge to run as the tape dispenser squeaked against the cardboard box, and her hand shook slightly as she wrote _'Derek's fishing stuff'_ on the box with a black sharpie. But that urge to renege on her offer went as quickly as it came, as Derek walked past her, giving her a quick squeeze and kiss on her cheek from behind. That worry turned into a smile as she remembered the line:

'_So this line…is it imaginary, or do I need a marker?'_

One thing was for sure- this time she wasn't drawing a line to keep him out- but to keep him in.

Once they had both come back down to reality, they had decided to spend one last night at the trailer- it was far too late to be moving boxes to Meredith's house anyway. Meredith had gotten up to find something to eat- Derek had laughed at her need for a 'midnight snack' and he got up too, slipping some underwear and a t-shirt on to finish off the last minute packing. She noticed him putting some freshly ironed shirts into a suit bag along with several suits, and silk ties.

"I didn't even know you had that many suits…" Meredith said thoughtfully as she poured two glasses of orange juice.

They must have been a Manhattan leftover, because aside from the two times he had been in a tux- the prom and Cristina's nearly wedding…and for the interview for chief…and the talk of having a suit for Susan's funeral- he had always been in jeans. Addison knew his suits, and she knew his jeans- his work ones and home ones, the ones that had been worn and washed so many times they were wearing thin, a hole forming at the pockets, the dark ones that he wore to work with his grey coat and black shoes… the tight ones that she made fun of. She began to wonder if he had an extensive cufflink collection, whether he liked wearing tie pins, what did Manhattan Derek like to wear? She had never considered it before- she had much bigger things to worry about than Derek's changes in fashion- like drownings and parents dying.

"I used to wear a lot of them in New York- but this is Seattle. Imagine me walking into Seattle Grace in an Armani suit?" Derek replied, zipping the bag up. "Jeans and a shirt are much more me, Meredith." He walked towards her, smiling with reassurance.

"Right. Would Manhattan Derek walk around the house in his old Bowdoin college t-shirt and boxers?" Meredith joked as he laughed with her, kissing her to stop her laughing at him.

Meredith realised why she was so scared while she was packing those boxes- Derek was giving up the trailer for her- and it was something that she considered to be so quintessentially him- it oozed Derek from every square inch. During the time they were broken up, it was the memory of them alone at the trailer that kept her going. She had fallen in love with him when he showed her that airstream trailer for the first time- and told her he lived there. She recalled when she asked him whether he was going to keep the trailer during the time they were broken up- when Addison was pushing for him to move out into a house that a successful doctor-couple ought to live in- and he vehemently told her that he was staying put in the trailer- regardless of whether Addison had to keep her three hundred dollar shoes in a box on the decking outside. All it took was for Meredith to say _'Will you move in with me?'_ and Derek was packing his things up that same evening.

She smiled into the darkness while Derek slept right beside her his breath hitting her neck in even, contented breaths as his arm was slung around her body protectively. Eventually they would be packing _their_ things into boxes and moving into a house they had built together. They would choose kitchen counters, type of wood floors, bathroom fixtures- and they would do it together. She'd be used to his constant chattiness, and know how to navigate around his fishing stuff left on the back porch, even in the pitch black of night, because she and Derek understood that house from it's very conception- it would be literally made for them both.

The night after, several trips to his trailer later, most of Derek's stuff was in scattered around Meredith's house, and it was then he realised exactly how crowded that house was. There wasn't enough place for four people's belongings, and according to him, the other two people who lived here were expendable. Maybe he had been slightly presumptuous,and thought that maybe Meredith would want to be alone as much as he did. When she told him that they were her family, that she couldn't throw them out, he had compromised and agreed that they could stay, even though he didn't really want them to. It made sense. If she could forgive him for choosing Addison instead of her initially, then he could live with her roommates for a little longer.

Derek had sat on the couch, and Meredith was still by the drink's cabinet, watching him watch her. She shrugged off her coat, and came to sit down beside him, as he moved up slightly to accommodate her. She sat close, leaning into him and asked him quietly, doubtfully, "So you still love me?"

Derek's heart broke a little when he saw that vulnerability in her eyes and heard it in her voice. Even though they have come so far, they still had so much further to go, the trust between them still so shaky and new. Did she really think that if she did or said something Derek didn't like, he'd withdraw from her again? He didn't like to admit that he _was_ prone to behaving like that- they both had to move on from being like that, and place trust in each other.

"Meredith…yes…" He sighed, closing the space between her to kiss her cheek gently and embrace her. If she didn't believe his words then he'd just have to show her.

They had come so far, and it was tough, but they were getting there. For once, the anticipated step back that they always made when they took two steps forward didn't happen. This time, the shoe didn't drop. As he felt Meredith relax into his embrace, he felt all her worry that he'd give her another ultimatum seep out of her, the tension draining away.

Meredith's heart continued to thud in her chest, and she was sure Derek could feel it too, but her whole body was buzzing with pride. This was a huge step for her. She had a problem, and she didn't get drunk, she didn't freak out, and didn't run away to bitch with Cristina. She stood there and told him the truth, even though it was hard and scary for her. Derek could have said that was a dealbreaker for him and moved back to the trailer. She was glad that he hugged her, and he couldn't see her face, because shock was plastered all over her face. It worked- they were growing and changing together for the first time, they were making baby steps towards a happy and functioning relationship. Right now, Meredith felt extraordinary because she was something that her mother couldn't be after Richard didn't come for her- she had the trust in herself and realised she had the ability to be lovable. It wasn't having Derek's love that was a revelation to her, it was the fact that she stood her ground because she thought she was right, even though she felt vulnerable and scared, pushed herself to tell Derek the opposite of what he wanted to hear. She had never been told by anyone before that she was allowed to be herself, and was loved anyway…and even more special, was loved _because _of it. She was worthy of love just the way she was.

He realised how hard it must have been for her to tell him that- to prepare herself to stand up to him. He loved this Meredith. He needed her. She was bossy, she kept him in line, and he was sure that those fists could be more effectual than he had originally claimed. They both had to work past the damage that they had accrued over the past year and move on together- and it was both exciting and daunting all at the same time.

Derek knew that he had to fix this- fix her. He knew he was part of the reason she was so damaged, and found it hard to touch- and he knew that part of it was due to factors out of his control. But now her problems were his problems, and it was his responsibility to fix everything that was broken about that woman that he loved, who was currently in his arms, learning and trying to trust him.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Three months later, and Derek still had unwanted roommates. He could hear them argue through the walls, they knocked on 'their' bedroom door while Derek was naked and waiting for Meredith, but all in all it wasn't too bad. He had gotten used to it. Sometimes it was nice coming home to the smell of Izzie's baking even if he didn't eat it, and it was good to have someone to talk to on the nights Meredith was working.

But that weekend, he wanted to be alone with Meredith.

In a compromise, Derek had let his trailer become Meredith's bolthole in exchange for Ellis's old office. They had just managed to sort through the last box, and had amassed enough of Ellis's completed journals to write a new surgical textbook. He'd insist Meredith have all the credit for that one. He'd just be a proofreader or something. Last week they'd hit a roadblock when their trial was named after him, and after a little prompting from Bailey, he realised that somewhere along the line he'd forgotten to say thankyou.

Meredith was beginning to feel as if life was running away from her. She was on a last night shift on a Thursday night and a weekend off, which meant that she had gotten one of those once-in-a-blue-moon long weekends. A weekend that would probably consist of catching up on weekly chores and sneaking away to the trailer for an afternoon with Derek on the Saturday. It was only eight o'clock, and Meredith knew Derek was about to come out of the OR. Perhaps if they were lucky they could share a meal of crappy cafeteria food.

Just as she considered paging him, she heard someone behind her. "Go out with me." The familiar voice said, their breath tickling the back of her neck.

She turned around seeing him flash a cheeky lop-sided grin as he leaned on the counter, eyes both tired and bright all at the same time. "What?" She asked in a confusion "Do you formally have to ask your girlfriend out on a date when you're co-habiting with her?"

If she didn't have such a serious expression on her face, Derek would have been sure she was mocking him. But she wasn't. She was learning the rules as she went along- like the joys of eating breakfast together when they could. Derek rolled his eyes, smiling brighter. "No, it's romance, Meredith. Write this down for today's entry of 'Mer's top secret journal'…"

"Meredith Chronicles, actually…." Meredith corrected, smiling right along with him. She had joked about that _before_ she knew her mother's journal's existed. Meredith had joked once that she would have had to write her experiences of residency down in a book, because no one would believe the amount of crap she had gone through in a year and a half.

"My bad, my . Write it down… _'went on first trip away with Derek to the wine country.'_" He said casually.

"Derek! That means we're leaving tomorrow, and I have absolutely NO clean clothes left! You could have told me sooner!" Meredith complained, even though she was buzzing inside. A trip away. She had never been on one of those before.

"Ha. You won't be needing any clothes. We'll spend the whole time in bed, and just before we leave, buy a case of wine to allude that we actually ventured out of the room." Derek explained, keeping his voice low in case any of the gossipy nurses got hold of it.

Meredith looked up at him from her chart. For a split second, she refused to believe him. Last time he said they were going away, he reneged on the offer and left her feeling like a dumped loser, and dropped a huge bombshell that she wasn't ready for, and set her a few steps back.

"There will be no fake,scary proposals this time, I promise." Derek guaranteed, as if he could read her mind.

This wasn't as scary as it seemed. She was taking another baby step to resembling a normal, happy couple. This was her leaping. Faith. Something. She had spent lots of lazy days with Derek before, only this time it wasn't in your frat house- youth hotel that you called home, it would be in a cute little wine lodge where there would be real animals running around outside, not Alex acting like one. She could be alone with Derek without any interaction with anyone else for forty eight hours, without wanting to rip his head off. Right?

Derek had gone home before Meredith had a break for dinner, and earlier on he texted her, telling her Izzie had left some muffins in her cubby that morning. Next chance she got to catch a break, she looked at her watch-it was midnight. Her stomach rumbled loudly, causing the night shift nurses to look up at her from their work. A chocolate muffin sounded good… a midnight snack right now.

She trudged to the resident's lounge, noticing some folded up papers next to the muffins. She took them out, unfolding them, and skimming the text, smiling to herself. It was a print out of the reservation he had made online to their hotel as proof that this was happening. At the bottom of the page, Meredith noticed a quick note scrawled in Derek's unique handwriting:

'_A real thank you to an amazingly talented woman, without whom, I'd be nothing. You didn't think the kidney was it, did you? Derek.x'_

Today Meredith was going have forty eight hours with Derek. These baby steps she was making felt pretty darn good.

**************************

_**My empty room crowded too soon**_

_**Look for the fire escape**_

_**Picture myself running like hell**_

_**Making my get away**_

_**The walls are caving in with no warning**_

_**This ship is sinking I gotta swim for it**_

_**I'm running out of air**_

_**Break me out tonight **_

_**I wanna see the sun rising anywhere but here**_

_**Come with me this could be the only chance we get, **_

_**We gotta take it **_

_**Don't do it now we'll never make it**_

_**Lose this crowd**_

_**Break me out**_

_**We'll stare at our feet**_

_**Sneak down the street**_

_**Some kind of secret race**_

_**They carry on, won't notice we're gone**_

_**So easily replaced**_

_**The walls are caving in with no warning**_

_**This ship is sinking I gotta swim for it**_

_**I'm running out of air**_

_**Break me out tonight**_

_**I wanna see the sun rising anywhere but here**_

_**Come with me this could be the only chance we get**_

_**We gotta take it **_

_**Don't do it now we'll never make it**_

_**Lose this crowd**_

_**Break me out.**_

**The rescues- break me out.**

r


	10. Chapter 10:Actions speak louder

_**CHAPTER 10:­­­­­­ ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS.**_

Derek's eyes popped open at the sound of the phone ringing loudly. He felt the bed shift as Meredith moved beside him to pick it up It was late, and he needed to sleep- he had a craniotomy first thing in the morning, and the last thing he needed was to be yawning into a brain. He had just been about to drift off, despite the fact Meredith was nowhere close to sleeping herself, and the light beside her bed disturbed him. But now he had no chance listening to Meredith discuss her mother's journals with Cristina animatedly on the phone. Derek groaned as all these surgical terms swirled in his head. He really did love his job, but home time was home time. He didn't want to talk only surgery, or only hear about surgery, or dream about it. He wanted to snuggle with his girlfriend and think of nothing but her.

They had had a really great time when they went away to Sonoma, and Derek had thought they were on an upward spiral to…somewhere. But as soon as they got back to Seattle, and Meredith had started trawling through the vast and numerous volumes of Ellis's journals, they had gone nowhere. She was on the phone to Cristina all the time, with Cristina all the time, and it was getting too much.

He didn't know whether he really wanted to read Ellis's diaries, and Meredith had never offered. He didn't really want to know the inner workings of Ellis Grey's mind, he already had to endure and try to fix the damage she had done to Meredith when she was still alive. She didn't want to know how Meredith affected- or didn't affect her mind. Oddly, she had never thought to share it with him, yet went straight to Cristina without any doubts, and had become almost obsessed with reading them. He often found her on the couch or on the bed, with several sprawled across any surface. His heart sank when he considered how many more Meredith had to go through, and was beginning to wonder what would fill her days once she had finished reading the journals.

Derek was so desperate to stop this thing with Cristina, and the only explanation he had for their particular closeness over the past few months was that Cristina no longer had Burke to occupy her time, and now she was filling it with surgeries and Meredith- it was good for her, but awful for Derek. If Derek could fill that void that Burke left maybe he could get his girlfriend back- the girlfriend Cristina snatched away from him as soon as they stepped foot in the hospital.

He saw the elevator doors open, and noticed his friend was inside it. If there was one person in the whole world that could distract Cristina and wouldn't mind being used, it was Mark Sloan. He made a run for the doors before they closed, and luckily they were alone.

"I need you to have sex with Cristina Yang." Derek told Mark. "Distract her. Engage her. Give her something to do after midnight except call my girlfriend and wake her up." He said grumpily.

Mark had refused, said that Cristina was humorless and no fun. Derek thought that it was Mark-speak for being too hard to get. She wouldn't be easy to seduce that was for sure, she'd see through Mark's fake bullshit, but he had to convince Mark to try it on with her in terms that he understood- so he described her as a single malt scotch, whereas most of Mark's past conquests were beer bongs. He wondered if he would have classed Addison as a beer bong…probably not. She'd be one of those overpriced bottles of champagne, that gave you a headache the next morning if you drank too much of it. Meredith would definitely be her favourite choice of poison-tequila. Painful yet unexplainably alluring, addictive…she had that real quality about her that made you want to have more and more of her.

By the time Derek had been ready to leave, it was Alex who told him that Meredith had left with Cristina as Derek waited in the lobby for her. Alex had given him a pitying smile. Even he knew that Meredith preferred to spend her time with Cristina rather than him. At least they were together though. After all this time of the 'will-they-or-won't-they' crap, they were finally living together, and were as happy as they had been since before Addison showed up. That was something, and Derek knew that this situation of sharing his girlfriend with Cristina Yang was better than having no Meredith at all. He'd just have to suck it up and ride it out. If he could endure months in a loveless marriage with Addison while they were 'trying' to make it work, he could cope with Yang stealing time with his girlfriend.

Eight o'clock. Hopefully Cristina was at her place… that was his hopeful thought process until he saw her bike parked in 'his' space- which was rather apt. She was taking his place in Meredith's life, in his bed, and it was getting more and more difficult for him to accept. He mumbled a hello to his roommates who were sitting on the couch, watching a movie, as his eyes scanned the rooms downstairs, looking for his girlfriend.

"Dude. Grey and Yang are upstairs studying her mom's journals." Alex half-laughed. He might as well have told Derek that Yang had ripped off his balls and was juggling with them. But he could cope for Meredith. It was all about Meredith.

Derek walked down the hallway slower than he usually would, listening out for Meredith and Cristina through the walls, he knew that these walls were thinner than he would have liked, and tried listening out for his name somewhere in their conversation. Maybe Meredith was so stuck on Cristina because she was talking to her about Derek- about things she felt she wasn't able to say. Except Derek had thought that the progress they were making up till now had been good, and had felt like there was a shift in their relationship after they had their mini-vacation; that Meredith was ready to fully commit. But he never heard his name, just some more surgical techniques. He sighed in frustration, bracing himself and gathering his strength against the door as he prepared to remain calm instead of be angry at his girlfriend and her best friend.

Cristina was sprawled out on _his_ side of the bed, wrong way up, doing some kind of yoga stretching while Meredith read out a passage from her mother's journal? What was this? Some screwed up book-club for the surgically-hungry? They both gently ribbed him about trying to hook Cristina up with Mark, but if they knew how desperate he was to get Cristina out of his bed- literally and metaphorically, they'd realise it wasn't as much of a joke as they had first thought.

Derek walked further into the room, unsure whether he would rather them be at the trailer, the place he had given her to escape from…him. Maybe she didn't want to be away from him. He wanted Cristina out of that room, and he wanted Meredith all to himself. He hadn't seen her all day, and wanted time alone. He knew exactly what to say to get her out of his space.

"Look, I'm gonna take my pants off now, so unless you wanna stay and see…" Derek told Cristina, smiling.

As predicted, Cristina hastily jumped up from the bed, emphatically. Derek watched her get ready to leave the room, his eyes following her, the fake smile being replaced with a more genuine one. What he didn't expect, however, was Meredith collecting up her journals.

She brushed her cheek on his lips as she passed him, saying "I'll see it later" before walking out of the room with her friend.

Derek exhaled a breath he didn't even know he was holding, as he wondered how reading her mother's journals trumped a good time with him.

Meredith would be up soon. He had defined 'soon' to mean within the hour, but two had passed and Meredith was still downstairs, reading on some technique- a technique Ellis perfected at the expense of building a relationship with her daughter.

Derek fell into a drowsy sleep, unable to stay awake and wait for Meredith any longer. He was woken up by the squeaky creak of the old door opening, as Meredith quietly tiptoed inside. She peeled back the bed sheets and slipped inside the warm bed, as Derek cracked an eye open to peek at the clock. It was midnight, and Meredith would have had less than five hours sleep. Meredith flipped off the bedside lamp Derek had left on for her, and moved closer and closer to him. Derek didn't make any effort to show her he was awake, keeping still, and breathing deeply and evenly.

It seemed as though Meredith remembered the promise of no pants, as her lithe body shifted against his, her soft lips finding his neck as she softly peppered kisses along it, her silky smooth hands finding their way under his worn t-shirt. She really had fully intended on seeing it later.

"Meredith…sleeping…" Derek mumbled into his pillow.

"Never stopped you before…" Meredith whispered against his ear lobe, her breath igniting his skin with a warmth.

"No." Derek said more forcefully, his ruse of being more asleep than he really was well and truly rumbled. "Just stop it!"

It took all of Derek's self control to not just roll over submissively and give into her demands, and his desires. That was the problem- for them, the sex made up for all the other crap that went on during the day, and instead of hiding away from it, Derek decided to face it head on. If he still loved Meredith during her candid moment of insisting Izzie and Alex still live in her house, then Derek could insist on this point.

"Are you mad at me or something?" Meredith asked him innocently, blinking in confusion in the darkness before flipping the light back on. "Is this about me teasing you about Mark?"

"I don't care about Mark. It's about Cristina, and how she's always here, how you call her in the middle of the night, how you push me out of your bed and gossip with her early in the morning. You talk _to her._" Derek explained, past the point of doing anything but blurting out everything he had been trying so hard to keep inside.

"Of course I'm close to her, Derek. She's my best friend. I trust her and confide in her." Meredith replied, crossing her arms and moving away from him.

"I'm your boyfriend. You can trust and confide in me. That's what a relationship is. " Derek paused for a breath, but a second later, he wished he hadn't, because the words that formulated in his brain during that inhalation of air pushed everything over the edge. "She's taking advantage. She was never this bothered in you, in your opinion when Burke was around. She was in her own bed, there were no phone calls. Now she has no-one, she's here all the time. She's using you, and you're taking it, yet you give me a hard time for the smallest things. She only wants Ellis's expertise in those journals, it's all about the surgery, about getting ahead. Did you even think about sharing them with me?"

Derek saw the blood drain from Meredith's face. Her cheeks that were red with anger a few moments before had become a deathly white, her smouldering eyes turned cold and hard. He might as well have slapped her, because it would have hurt her less. He could see her searching in her mind for a retort, but none came. She was too shocked that Derek went there. It was too low, just like how bringing everything back round to the secret wife and staying with her would have been a bottom-of-the-barrel argument. Burke and Cristina's failed wedding certainly had set off a series of events that had ended the easy period of their relationship, and they had entered some hard times, and were at the end of the tunnel, and Derek had killed it again.

Meredith suddenly shot out of the bed, standing up, throwing a sweater on from the ground. She picked up the first two socks she could find on the floor, and pulled them on, before grabbing her mother's diaries on the nightstand.

"It's always about you, Derek. I thought up the trial, it gets _your_ name, my drowning was about how _you_ couldn't cope, the bomb blowing up in my face prompted you to end _your_ marriage. As for Ellis's journals- why do you even care what's in them? It's all surgery, I'm not even mentioned. Why would I want to share that with you?" She opened the door forcefully, already striding angrily halfway down the hallway before Derek reached the threshold to the bedroom.

"Where are you going, Meredith? It's midnight already."

Meredith turned round, her expression and tone of voice sarcastic. "Maybe I'll go stay with Cristina. You seem to think I love her more anyway." She answered before stomping down the stairs.

The door to Izzie's bedroom opened quickly, as both Alex and Izzie popped their heads out to see what all the commotion was about. They saw Derek sulking angrily at the doorway to the bedroom, giving him sympathetic smiles before shutting their door again when they heard the front door slam, and her car engine start and fade as she drove down the street.

Derek had come downstairs to Izzie and Alex already at the table, and Izzie smiled supportively, holding out a cup of coffee to him. He sat there in Meredith's kitchen, making small talk with the roommates he wanted out, and he realised- it didn't feel like home without Meredith in it. He felt like a guest, not like he belonged. When Meredith was there by his side, or upstairs trying to find something to wear that did not need ironing, he felt like he was in the right place. That morning though- he felt like an outsider.

"How much did you hear?" Derek asked wearily, sipping the coffee from the flowery mug.

"Just shouting. No specifics…" Alex said, smiling quickly.

"We kinda heard something about Cristina though…" Izzie told him truthfully. "Not that we were listening or anything…" She added quickly, before hurrying out of the kitchen.

Over the day, Derek had caught glimpses of Meredith around. At times, they had been frozen, unsure how the other had taken the argument the night before, and when Derek had decided to make a move and approach her, something had prevented them from talking. It was either her pager, or being dragged away by someone, or being with Cristina…and Derek wanted to avoid that confrontation at all costs.

However, being face to face with Cristina proved unavoidable once they had to go into emergency surgery together, and while they were scrubbing in, Derek realised something. Cristina was acting normally with him, that slightly distant air about her, yet respectful- Meredith hadn't told her. Even if she had told her he and Meredith had a fight, she hadn't told her best friend it was about her- and for that, Derek was grateful to Meredith- perhaps he had been quite unfair to her.

The closer he got to going home, the more anxious he got about facing Meredith- or admitting that she had run away from a further confrontation. He had pulled out of the hospital parking lot, and had reluctantly driven to Meredith's house- but he didn't see her car there. He went inside, and before he could ask the question, Alex answered for him.

"I saw her go off with Yang. Sorry man." Alex said with understanding.

Derek's shoulders slumped with resignation, and he made his way to the trailer- he just wanted to sleep after his lack of it the previous night- he could deal with Meredith after he had at least six hours. He drove through to the clearing, where he saw Meredith's jeep parked in it's usual spot- the lights on throughout the trailer. Derek wasn't surprised. He did say this was her place to escape, and maybe she was taking her chance to fill Cristina in on every sordid detail of their quarrel.

He stepped onto the deck tentatively, but on first glance could see no one inside. He opened the door carefully and quietly, and saw that there was old coffee in the pot, that he bed was unmade on Meredith's side. She hadn't spent the night with Cristina, she had spent it in the trailer- alone. Momentarily distracted by this realisation, he let go of the door, and it sprung back on it's spring hinges, slamming closed.

He could hear Meredith's shocked scream in the corner of the bedroom, as she lunged forward into the doorway with Derek's old tennis racket, the one with no strings, brandishing it as a weapon.

Meredith saw Derek with a bemused expression on his face as he tried not to laugh at her completely non-offensive weapon. She dropped it to the ground in defeat, and put her right hand on her heart, willing the palpitations to stop. "I swear to god Derek! You scared the living crap out of me. I nearly died of a heart attack! You could have been some crazed psycho out to kill me!" She ranted.

Derek swallowed his laughter. "I'm sorry." He said softly, approaching her as if she were wounded. "Not just about scaring you. But I'm sorry for last night."

He was earnest, Meredith had to give him that at least. Meredith closed the distance between them, not quite touching him, but felt comforted knowing that if she reached her arms out, she could have been hugging him. "I'm sorry too. I didn't realise what I was doing- I didn't _mean_ to shut you out, it's just- I've never done this before. I don't get to the stage where I fight with a boy, let alone make up with them, and then you show up here…"

"Mer…" Derek whispered, being the one to pull her into his comforting chest, wrapping his arms around her protectively. "From now on, you can expect that I'm gonna show up. Even if I yell. Even if you yell. I'm always gonna show up."

Meredith exhaled closing her eyes and revelling in Derek's smell, his touch as his hands rubbed her back soothingly, the way she could feel the dull thud of his heartbeat. She didn't know how long they had just stayed like that in silence- enjoying this moment, and right then, time didn't really matter all that much, because for the first time since their trip away to the wine country- it was just Meredith and Derek- her and him.

Derek's chin rested on her head, as he still held her. "I looked for you at home. Alex said you were with Cristina…how did you get here so quickly?"

"I didn't stay with Cristina for long- I just went to pick up her lot of Ellis's journals." Meredith said, peeling herself out of Derek's embrace, taking his hand and leading him to the bedroom where two large boxes were taped up and _'MOM'S DIARIES'_ were scrawled in large letters. "I'm not going to read them anymore." Meredith said, running her fingers over one of the boxes, resisting the urge to let her mind get lost in her tumultuous history with her mother.

Derek remained silent, but held on to her other hand anyway, letting her speak when she was ready. This was a huge thing for Meredith to deal with. Ellis seemed to haunt her well after she was dead- her spirit kept appearing to create another roadblock in Meredith and Derek's relationship, and Derek didn't want her to affect them anymore- and by the looks of things, neither did Meredith.

"You know what I realised last night while I was driving to stay here? She didn't mention me for a reason- a journal is a private thing- where you're supposed to keep your innermost thoughts- and I was never amongst them, and neither was Richard- it was about surgery after surgery, and that was it. I was never really at the forefront of her mind- I was always an afterthought- and inconvenience, and I always took second place to her work. Those journals weren't meant for me to read, Derek. She trusted me with her disease, she told me to keep it a secret from everyone- asked me to cut my Europe trip short after she got diagnosed. She made me power of attorney to her affairs, her accounts, her nursing home bills- she put her life in my hands, and left a detailed, extensive will. She made funeral arrangements, and charitable donations, and left me with a huge chunk of change after she died- and not once, not anywhere did she write about these diaries. They weren't meant to impart her wisdom on me- they weren't written to share with me. Just because we found them doesn't mean I should have read them. It hasn't given me an eye-opener into another side of Ellis Grey I never saw. It just confirmed everything I knew before."

Derek led them to the bed, pulling her down on top of him as he sat on the edge of the bed, as she continued staring at the two boxes infront of her, still haunting her. "So… what are we going to do? Keep them? Get rid of them? Donate them?" Derek asked, stroking his hand through her honeyed strands.

"All I know is that I can't read them.I can't live my life continuing her work- I'm not her, and I'm not even like her. I have to live for me, and at my level. I was happy- we were happy before I started reading these diaries. What's the point in making a dead person proud at the expense of being with you?"

Her name escaped his lips in barely a whisper, as his lips brushed the side of her head, his hands holding hers tightly as he heard her open up to him like she never had before. He sounded like he was as pained as she was, as she laid Ellis's ghost to rest again. He would have done anything to take this away- if he knew how to. Sometimes, Derek felt inadequate, not knowing how to help Meredith in those situations, and the only thing he could do was be there, show up, love her.

"We should argue more often…" Meredith said to Derek breathlessly, as she fell back onto the sheets, as Derek rolled over to face her, both of them tired- and deliciously naked.

"Hmm…" Derek sighed contentedly, opening his eyes to meet Meredith's. They were shiny again, open to him, not clouded by the doubt that had been occupying them days before. "Make up sex is good."

They settled into a comfortable position, Derek right up behind her, his free arm wrapped tightly around her, pulling her further into his body- her skin touching his as they laid there in the darkness, the moon peeking through the skylight, illuminating the bedroom with a dull glow.

"It's so scary. Arguing, thinking it's over…putting yourself out there to someone and finding pieces of yourself you didn't even know you lost- or adding bits of you to make you a more whole person." Meredith whispered to him as Derek's head shifted closer to the back of hers, as he said nothing, just choosing to tighten his grip on her, inhaling her sweet smell.

"I love you, Derek." She said in a hushed tone in the darkness.

Her admission echoed around the metal walls of the trailer. _**I love you**__.__** I**_love you. I _**love**_ you. I love_**you**__. _Meredith wasn't one of those girls who said those three words flippantly just to emotionally blackmail a man, and she wasn't the type of girl who said it because she thought she ought to, or because it was the done thing. In fact, there had been times where Meredith's actions conveyed her love, and it seemed like the declaration was on the tip of her tongue, and it never came out. Except this time it had, and Derek knew what a milestone it was for her to say it first, without tagging a 'too' on the end after he had said it first. She had said it all on her own- it came from to depth of her heart.

Meredith had probably never been given the feeling someone would reciprocate that admission of love if she had declared it- she had certainly never gotten that from her mother- the journals confirmed it. Her mother only showed her that emotions were weak- that it was your actions that counted- and yet, Derek couldn't help but be proud of Meredith in that moment- she had done the hardest thing- be sincere and have her words match the emotions behind them perfectly. The saying '_actions speak louder than words'_ wasn't really true. Those three little words felt pretty damn great- the best thing was when the actions matched the words- and Meredith had done that. She _was_ active and present in their relationship- they had taken another step that night. The had fought, made up, and learnt something about each other they didn't know before.

"I love you too." Derek replied, his heart feeling lighter than it had ever done in years.

*********************

_**What if we stop having a ball?  
What if the paint chips from the wall?  
What if there's always cups in the sink?  
What if I'm not what you think?  
I am**_

What if I fall further than you?  
What if you dream of somebody new?  
What if I never let you in?  
Chase you with a rolling pin?  
Well, what what if I do?

Cuz I am giving up on making passes  
And I am giving up on half empty glasses  
And I am giving up on greener grasses  
I am giving up

What if our baby comes in after nine?  
What if your eyes close before mine?  
What if you lose yourself sometimes?  
And I'll be the one to find you  
Safe in my heart

Cuz I am giving up on making passes  
And I am giving up on half empty glasses  
And I am giving up on greener grasses  
I'm giving up

_**For you**_

_**I'm giving up**_

**Ingrid Michaelson- Giving up.**


	11. Chapter 11a: Viva Las Vegas

_**CHAPTER 11:­­­­­­­­­­ VIVA LAS VEGAS**_

Her house had become their home, little reminders that Derek really lived there. His sunglasses lay on the side table in the kitchen where he last left them, his half completed crossword lay on the counter, pen left by it's side ready for him to pick up again when he had a spare few minutes in the mornings. She had learned not the throw away that part of the newspaper until the next Sunday came around remembering the first time she had done it:

For once, Meredith wasn't in a rush in the morning. That was the beauty of having a morning off a week to do all the trial stats with Derek in his office. They could 'work from home' which usually meant waking up after 8am, which suited Meredith just fine. She came downstairs in sweatpants and a worn t-shirt, met by Derek's light mumblings as he rifled through piles of papers in the kitchen.

"What have you lost?" Meredith asked, pouring herself a cup of coffee. She thought that maybe he lost an important piece of trial paper, he was looking for it with such purpose.

"Newspaper." He mumbled, concentrated as he looked through the daunting pile of mail no one wanted to deal with. "I had it right on the counter yesterday."

"Oh. It was garbage day today. I threw it out last night with the rest of the trash when Alex wheeled the bin out." Meredith said easily as she spooned sugar into her coffee.

Derek sighed in frustration, a sound of annoyance escaping his lips, somewhere between a 'grr' and an 'argh'. "I hadn't completed it yet."

"It's Friday, Derek. You've had four days to complete it…and you we staring at it for hours on Sunday while I took that nap on the couch. I was asleep for three hours and when I woke up, you were still frowning at it like it was the world's greatest puzzle." Meredith replied, trying to hide the laughter in his voice as he almost pouted, childlike. "I thought you cheated anyway".

Derek's frown turned into a smile as he saw the control Meredith was exerting as she tried not to giggle, especially at her last comment. He could see her willing her eyebrow not to arch like it usually did when she questioned him, and he was sure she was biting her cheek to suppress the smile, but her eyes gave her away. They shone naughtily, little specks of gold twinkling mischievously.

"Listen, you. I only cheat on the Friday if I haven't managed to solve the questions." Derek laughed, capturing her in his arms.

"What's even the point? Is it because you like to show you _can_ complete it?" Meredith asked teasingly, leaning into him, resting her head on his shoulder as she sipped her coffee.

"Just like how someone here likes to change the _printed_ numbers in the Sudoku puzzles because she can't count to nine." Derek replied back in the same tone.

"Hey!" Meredith responded indignantly "I only cheated that ONE time- and it was rated difficult!" Meredith couldn't keep her frown up any longer, and continued teasing. "I'm just a lowly second year resident anyway.A world class neurosurgeon who has a tumour killing technique named after him, such as yourself _ought_ to be able to complete a new york times crossword, right?"

Derek laughed, his breath tickling her neck. "Yup. Just don't tell anyone it's actually all the work of my beautiful, talented, intelligent resident."

"I'll storm your lecture on that conference really dramatically and announce that you're a fraud." Meredith giggled, turning her face to kiss him.

The joys of co-habitation according to Derek Shepherd had started with having breakfast together, sharing that first meal of the day, and Meredith had remained sceptical about it for a while. Normally Meredith was a little grumpy in the mornings- maybe if her day started at seven instead of five she would have been more enthusiastic. But now after living with Derek in her house for the past few months, she was coming round to his way of thinking. There _was _something in starting off the day together- even if invariably it didn't end that way, given trauma pages and night shifts. Instead of gulping down coffee and grabbing a cereal bar or sugary treat that Izzie had baked, Meredith had gotten used to the toast and cereal that Derek had everyday.

Breakfast gave them a chance to sort out the crap that had accumulated the day before- and at the weekends, sit at the table and exchange sections of the newspaper with a silent kiss and a smile, becoming a well practiced routine. This morning however, they had been welcomed with a pile of mail that Alex had left on the counter for them, and after much procrastination, Meredith had decided to go through it.

Bill. Junk. More bills. More Junk. Meredith handed over a large envelope addressed to Derek, wondering what was in it. She craned her neck as Derek sipped his coffee, ripping the envelope open and reading the covering letter.

"Hmm." He said quietly as he read. "There's a neuro-oncology conference in Las Vegas in November. They want me to present our trial. They sent some more information by mail."

Meredith knew they would be asking Derek to present their clinical trial at conferences. The chief had been shouting about it, manly back-slapping Derek, his star neurosurgeon. It was ok, Meredith knew that was the way things worked. Seniority prevails, she had even gotten used to it being named after him- she had been making sure he'd been thanking her ever since.

She smiled genuinely as him from the other side of the table. She had come to learn that they shared both achievements and failings as a couple, she had learned to find the satisfaction in sometimes supporting him, and sometimes being supported by him. Even though it had his name, it really was their trial, it was literally a labour of their love. Meredith was grateful to the trial, knowing that if the long list of failures and then that one success hadn't occurred, they wouldn't have been as strong as a couple, and Derek wouldn't have been sharing breakfast with her like they'd be doing it everyday for the rest of their lives.

Meredith dropped her keys into the bowl by the door and kicked off her shoes. She had met Cristina at Joe's after work, had a couple of drinks, and left. Gone were the days when they'd both be sitting at the bar all night, knocking back shot after shot, ranting about each other's lives. Cristina had Owen, and was actually happy with that. He was the first relationship she had had after Burke, and he couldn't have been more different. There wasn't any forcing her to live with him, to marry him, to have the huge fairytale wedding. Cristina was actually _happy._ She had finally met her match, someone whom she could talk to, could understand her, and after and initial rocky period in the friendship, where neither Meredith or Cristina knew where they stood, they had learned that perhaps you could still be close but not too close to each other, that you could still confide in each other and keep certain things in your life secret- only to be shared with your boyfriend.

The alcohol made her hungry, and she made her way to the fridge, hoping that she wouldn't have to cook for herself, knowing she was in the house on her own for the night and couldn't rely on someone making dinner for her. Pizza delivery it would be- until she saw the box of her favourite pasta from her favourite restaurant and a little note Derek left on it:

_Because I always buy you dinner on Thursdays. D x_

Tonight was supposed to be 'date night' and he wasn't there. They had made an agreement soon after the string of strays they invited into their house and the disruptions that having Izzie and Alex in the house created that they would always have one night of the week where it was just themselves, a meal at a restaurant, with a bottle of wine. It was something that, no matter how awful their schedules were, even if they had barely seen each other in forty eight hours (which happened more often than either of them would like,) they would always have that dinner together. Even if Meredith was working the night shift on that Thursday, they would either sneak in a lunch date or eat a bad meal in a quiet corner of the hospital cafeteria. They looked forward to it, where it was just them- no interruptions. This Thursday was their date night, but instead Meredith was eating the meal alone, because Derek was just about landing in Las Vegas.

It wasn't the guarantee of eating one good meal that made date night the one night in the week to look forward to, Meredith realised that now as she rinsed off her one plate and put it in the dishwasher, it was everything else the meal was about. The way Derek proudly asked for a table for two under his name, how his hand guided her through the tables in the restaurant, as if he was showing the whole world she was with him. She loved the way he still always laughed that she'd doggie bag some of her main course, and still scoff down her dessert like she hadn't eaten for a week. It was the little touches, the laughter, the easy chatting. Meredith had wondered how she had gotten from being intimidated by the need for constant conversation, to being comforted by it.

Meredith was jolted awake as she thought she heard the phone, not getting to it on time, hearing the answer machine beep as she tried to locate the cordless handset. Certainly living in a house with three other people meant that she couldn't even rely on her own memory of where _she_ had kept it, not that she would have remembered. She pressed the button, and listened to the message.

"Hey. It's just me. I tried calling your cell, but it just kept ringing, so I figured you're either at Joe's or you've fallen asleep. If you're at Joe's I want to let you know that there's food waiting for you in the fridge, and if you've already eaten it, hope you've enjoyed it. So… I actually called to let you know I reached here safely. I haven't made it onto the strip just yet- it's only midnight, the night's still young, right? Instead we had some kind of speaker dinner thing, which is why I couldn't call you right away…they keep asking where my inspiration for the trial came from, and every time I tell them it's you. See? May be named after me, but I'm giving you all the credit. Anyway, I'll stop talking, I really hate those long messages where you stand by the machine for ages, wondering when it's gonna end. Don't call back, just sleep. You have one more day shift and then it's nights after right? Stick to the sleep schedule. It's easier. Love you."

She could hear him flip his phone shut, and then the machine beeped shrilly, ending the message.

"No really, that message he left on the answer machine was really cute, Mer." Izzie said brightly, pulling her scrub shirt over a long sleeved yellow shirt.

Meredith rolled her eyes and shook her head as she clipped her pager onto her lab coat. She knew she should have deleted that message, but she never thought that anyone else would listen to it.

"Did you miss him so much that you cried into his pillow, inhaling his scent?" Cristina asked sarcastically, as Meredith grinned at her.

Somehow, she and Derek were never that couple. Sure, they missed each other, and loved each other, but they didn't live in each other's pockets. They had their own things to do, own interests, and they had found a balance that worked for them. Derek sometimes went out with Mark, and Meredith went out with her friends, and at the end of the night, they'd fall into bed beside each other and wake up the next day. The love and affection wasn't suffocating, it was just there without them having a crushing dependence on it- that message really was enough- she didn't need to have another two hour meaningless conversation on the phone with him when he told her everything she needed to know over the message.

"Good job I have an unlimited price plan on my cell. I called him, talking on the phone with him for hours, and we fell asleep together on the phone, listening to the sound of each other breathing, as if he were right by my side!" Meredith played along.

Meredith tried to concentrate on work as the day went on, knowing that Derek was going to present their trial today. It had been published for a few months now, they had perfected the viral cocktail, and now they were saving more people than they were killing. Significantly more. Their success was growing and word was spreading with every single patient they saved. The success was originally attributed to luck, but now people realised it was ingenuity and skill- and Derek's presenting schedule was only going to get more busy.

She shouldn't have been as nervous about it as she was, but he was presenting their baby. He was telling the world about something that was her idea, something that she had had to push him to believe was possible and she had to put a lot of faith in him to let him explain to people the success of their trial. At the crux of her insecurity that overtook her for those few hours was remembering how close they were to failing, to losing it, to never realising that maybe it _could_ work. If they had been shut down, if it had been deemed unsuccessful, Meredith didn't think that her relationship with Derek would have survived that strain- it was already at breaking point. The only thing that stopped them from crossing that line from success into failure was one patient. And in that patient, they may have only made one small change to make it work-so many things were riding on this- her relationship, her faith in herself, in medicine and in the world…maybe even in god…and now Derek was presenting this thing in Las Vegas. She trusted him to do it justice, to tell everyone all the pitfalls they encountered and how they prevented other ones. Even if she was only a second year resident, she knew her baby inside out, upside down and back-to-front.

Relief rushed into her body when she felt her cell phone vibrate against her hip in her lab coat. It was Derek texting her.

_Presentation kicked ass. You can breathe now. Miss you. D x_

Meredith smiled at his text as she tapped on the keys quickly. Sending some congratulations his way, throwing in an 'I miss you too' somewhere.

Derek seemed to know her really well. Over the past few months of living together, they had learned the other persons little quirks, those idiosyncrasies that made the person who they were. He knew that Meredith's heart would be in her mouth throughout the whole day, and him just acknowledging that helped. He knew she'd either been asleep or at Joe's the night before, and letting him know her that well didn't seem like she was giving herself or her independence away, but she was finding that it gave her the ability to truly be herself.

"What are you planning to do in your next two days off?" Cristina asked her at the end of their shift, as she pulled her hair out of the collar of her leather coat.

Meredith looked up at the ceiling tiles in the resident's lounge as she considered what she would actually do, without Derek there and a weekend free. What did she used to do pre-Derek? They were used to spending any weekends she had off together, managing to occupy those two days doing nothing. Even if he was on-call, as an attending, most of the problems he was paged for could be dealt with over the phone, delegating work to the fellows, only having to go in for extreme emergencies. Most of the time he managed to stretch any surgeries to Monday if they remained stable. Weekends were their time.

"Sleep maybe. What about you?" Meredith shrugged. She would wait till Sunday night, and Derek would be back home, but until then, she still had some of Ellis's boxes that were dumped straight in the garage from the office. Maybe she'd go through the stuff and actually decide to throw away some of it this time.

"Study. It still hurts that the interns knew how to suture better than me. _Interns,_ Meredith!" Cristina scowled as if she said a dirty word. "If I were you, I'd go give McDreamy a surprise in Las Vegas…it's only a short plane ride away, you know he'd LOVE it." Cristina told her, half joking. But Meredith couldn't entertain such a thought.

Right?

Cristina's suggestion was still playing heavily on Meredith's mind when she got home. Going to Las Vegas for the weekend was certainly possible, and in fact, just the right amount of time to visit a place like that. Stay there too long and the lights make your head go funny. Leave now, come back on the same flight as Derek, they'd be back in time for an early Monday morning start that Derek had, and she would have more than enough sleep by the time she started in the evening. But it was a stupid idea, because they weren't a clingy couple. Meredith could easily live without Derek for a weekend, because god knows she was without him for a LONG time.

Reaching the front door, she saw one of those poster tubes on the front porch, and smiled as she realised that it must have been from the architect they had hired to draw up plans. There had been drafts and redrafts of the plans, with Derek insisting that the house had to be perfect for both of them. They'd be living there for a long time, perhaps even forever. She walked quickly into the house, opening the top of the tube and rolling out the plans onto the kitchen table, quickly skimming the covering letter from the architect, seeing that their plans had been approved and now all they had to do was tell their contractor.

Meredith's whole body was buzzing. Their house plans had been approved, this was really happening. And instead of being scared about it and wanting things to stay the same, she was actually really excited that the house was going to be built. She was more than ready for it, she knew that she could live with Derek and not need anyone to buffer any situation, they had learned to love and support each other.

Without thinking, Meredith pulled her phone out of the front pocket of her jeans, her fingers hovering over the buttons, three moves away from dialling Derek. But in that moment, something had changed. Laying on the kitchen table were the plans to her future- with Derek. And she couldn't just tell him over the phone, it wasn't like asking him what they'd have for dinner, it was something more than that. As Meredith stared at the plans with rooms that could become playrooms and kids' bedrooms, and basements that could be converted into anything they wanted for kids and pets and whatever else they wanted to fill their lives with, the silent 'forever' that was assumed as they saw the house plans suddenly had a certain gravity to them.

Meredith was ready to share the rest of her life with Derek.

Just calling Derek wasn't enough. Impulsively, she opened up the lid of her laptop, running to get her purse from the hallway, pulling out her credit card as she looked for flights to Vegas. She wanted to be with Derek. She had two days to do nothing, and for once, she wasn't over thinking anything. Some of the best things Meredith had done on impulse- picking Derek up in Joe's that first night, making the house of candles… sometimes you just had to do what you wanted.

The next flight was leaving in an hour and a half, she typed in her credit card details and bashed on the temperamental printer in Derek's office, trying to make it work so that it would print out a copy of her ticket.

Meredith was going to Vegas.

"I've done something… spontaneous…" Meredith told Izzie from the threshold of the door, where Izzie was laying on her bed and reading some chick-lit feel good trash.

"Spontaneous like… 'LVAD-wire cutting' spontaneous or 'oh my god, I just ate a whole slab of cheese' spontaneous, because I have done both of those things. So no judgement from me." Izzie said, looking up from her book, shifting to the side of the bed and patting the empty space, urging Meredith to join her.

Meredith walked forward cautiously, perching on the edge of the bed as she played with the end of her sleeve. "I've just booked a ticket to Vegas…" Meredith said heavily, as if she were guilty of something.

"Oh that's great!" Izzie beamed, jumping up from the bed, walking to Meredith's room, pulling out her suitcase and dumping things in it.

Izzie was folding the things neatly into the case as Meredith pulled them out of drawers and her closet, throwing them in the general direction of the bed. Her mind was buzzing, wanting to just get there to see Derek. She didn't know what this feeling was inside of her, it was an emotion she hadn't experienced before, and couldn't decipher any of the thoughts or feelings apart from this burning desire to see Derek. She couldn't try and rationalise it. It was not a clinginess, or just because she was missing him- it was something much more than that.

"Take a black dress, Mer. You'll always need one of those." Izzie said from behind her, as Meredith surveyed her wardrobe.

She pulled out one she had never worn before, one that hung out in her closet for a special occasion, but had never come up. She pulled out the black Ralph Lauren dress and walked over to the case, placing it on top of all the other clothes and then closing the zipper.

Derek shrugged off his suit jacket, draping it onto the back of the chair in his hotel room, sitting down on the edge of the bed to untie his shoes. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and checked to see if Meredith had called him during dinner, and he didn't hear it, but there were no missed calls. He frowned as he noticed the time was eleven thirty, late considering Meredith was off that evening. He resisted the urge to call her, logically knowing that the world wouldn't end if they didn't speak to each other all evening. Maybe she was with Cristina and lost track of time, or maybe she was stuck in an emergency surgery that she was paged to at the last minute at the end of her shift.

All night he had been congratulated about the success of the trial, been told that it was something ground breaking, that it was special. The only thing that was really special was Meredith. She was the one to convince him to even contemplate doing the trial- he was never one to do risky trials- he preferred to cure people in ways people knew worked. Without her, Derek would have just been another one of those neurosurgeons who was good at what he did- but never did anything outside the box, and now everything had changed, and he had Meredith to thank for all of it.

He didn't need Meredith there, but he wanted her to be by his side. He wanted to show people the actual resident behind the trial, the one who conceived the idea, who did all the work behind it. Over the past few months, their relationship had gone from strength to strength, and it was easy for him to forget all the bad times. But they had happened, and if they hadn't, they wouldn't have been in the position to plan a house together, argue about square footage and whether the kitchen should be at the front or the back of the house, and still sleep beside each other at night.

Derek dialled Meredith's number anyway, listening to the rings as he waited for her to pick up the call.

"Hello?" Meredith answered, sounding flustered and surprised.

"Meredith? Are you ok?" Derek asked, wondering why she sounded out of breath, her tone of voice sounding shocked that he was calling.

"Me? Yeah, I'm fine. Actually, great…missing you, but good." She replied hastily, sounding preoccupied, and perhaps even a little guilty, although Derek couldn't imagine why. "So...tell me, how was the presentation? On a scale of one to ten of kicking ass, how much did it kick ass?"

He knew Meredith didn't mean it that way, but Derek's heart panged painfully as he was taken back to that time in his mind after she drowned. That time where she was so closed emotionally Derek honestly thought she'd never open up again. He was so frustrated all the time with her unwillingness to tell him anything that was going on in her mind, and he had said some things that he didn't mean- like not wanting to breathe for her.

But things were different now. Meredith was different now. She was the woman he met at Joe's that night, she was that girl full of attitude that he found attacking Alex in the locker room, she was that person he fell in love with before Addison came back. She had gotten over all the damage, and had come back better.

"Ten, of course!" Derek said with mock-arrogance. He was grinning into the phone, his voice dripping with mischief. He sat back on the bed, loosening his tie and unbuttoning his top button of his shirt, sinking back into the pillows, wishing she was there to see the expression on his face, feel his arms squeeze her with a hug.

"I wish I was there to listen to it…seeing as I co-wrote it and all." Meredith joked.

"Don't worry, all through dinner I told them how indispensible my resident was. When they asked your name, I told them, and then they realised you must be Ellis Grey's daughter. I guess they were surprised the legacy lived on."

"So would my mother." Meredith laughed ruefully. "The last time she saw me, she thought I was a waste of space."

Meredith knew that her mother's impression of her wasn't true. Derek told her and showed her every single day. Although Meredith had come on leaps and bounds from before, when thinking about her mother and what her mother thought of her caused her to spiral into a depression, now she approached it with a resolution. Her mother wasn't the best mother, and her father wasn't the best father, but she could be loved. Derek loved her, she had friends, she was trying to learn to be a big sister and counsel Lexie. Sometimes, you had to create your own family when the one you were given was crap.

"You're not a waste of space to me Meredith. I think you're pretty amazing, you know that?" Derek said softly, trying to ease any kind of pain Meredith might have been feeling by what she said, no matter how off-handedly she may have said it.

Something inside Meredith still fluttered whenever Derek said something complimentary about her. She wasn't used to being praised, being told she was special to someone, and Derek told her and showed her everyday. Meredith had never really believed she was worthy of someone's love, let alone someone that she actually loved back. For a long time, it was overwhelming and scary, but she now realised that it was something she was most proud of- she was groomed to be a surgeon by her mother, but she wasn't taught to love and be loved.

That's why she was now paying the cab driver, gesturing to keep the change as she got to the resort where the conference was held, about half an hour away from the strip, away from the bustle and bright lights but close enough for a visit. She dragged her suitcase to the front desk, noticing others milling around the foyer, obviously attending the conference. She smiled confidently at the front desk, acting as if she were truly a guest at the hotel instead of a gatecrasher. Ten minutes to midnight, in a city where a day really does last twenty for hours, where one day runs into the next. Time is ruled by money- run out of it, and your time's up.

Maybe because she was making another grand gesture of turning up, and knowing how inarticulate she normally was at telling Derek how she felt, Meredith didn't know how to answer him back, when he told her she was amazing. She didn't know how to react- was she supposed to say 'I know' or 'thankyou' or 'you too'? Everything sounded so lame when she thought about saying it. She was in Las Vegas, they had said goodbye only thirty six hours ago, and now she was getting on an elevator, to the floor where Derek's room was, just to surprise him.

Words failed her.

But then who cared about her inability to articulate the feelings that were buzzing inside of her, when she was standing right outside of his door? She could hear him thinking in silence, waiting for the answer that she never intended to give verbally. She stood outside, knowing he was on the other side, that only a few feet separated them from being reunited. She stopped for a second, a millisecond of doubt and apprehension filling her mind as it always did. Even though she continually put herself out there, showing more and more commitment was still scary, even if the doubt was more a force of habit than real fear.

She swallowed down the jittery nerves and took a deep breath, closing her eyes as she made her shaky hand into a fist and knocked on the door.

Derek heard someone knocking on the door. It was late…eleven something, what could someone want at this time? He was still waiting for Meredith to answer, he knew as soon as he said it that she wouldn't know how to respond. She was still embarrassed by some of the compliments he sent her way, and either batted them away with self-deprecation, or he'd distract her with a tight squeeze and a kiss. God, how he wished she were here now, snuggling by her side on that bed that was far too big for just one person.

"Mer, just a minute, someone's at the door." He groaned, pushing himself up and off the bed as he padded the few feet to the door.

He nearly dropped his phone in surprise and blinked a few times as he saw Meredith there, suitcase by her side and phone to her ear as she smiled at his shyly, her cheeks burning red.

"Hi." She smiled, giving him a small wave as she hung up her phone and jumped into arms he didn't even know he had open until he caught her.

Midnight came and went as they held each other in their arms, doorway still open, one body in the room, one body out. Their touch was magnetic, and neither of them really wanted to let go.

She was there. In Las Vegas. For him.

***************************************

_**Well you done done me and you bet I felt it  
I tried to be chill but you're so hot that I melted  
I fell right through the cracks  
Now I'm trying to get back  
Before the cool done run out  
I'll be giving it my bestest  
And nothing's gonna to stop me but divine intervention  
I reckon it's again my turn to win some or learn some**_

But I won't hesitate no more, no more  
It cannot wait, I'm yours

Well open up your mind and see like me  
Open up your plans and damn you're free  
Look into your heart and you'll find love love love love  
Listen to the music of the moment, maybe sing with me  
All - ah peaceful melody  
And it's our God-forsaken right to be loved love loved love loved

So I won't hesitate no more, no more  
It cannot wait I'm sure  
There's no need to complicate  
Our time is short  
This is our fate, I'm yours

**Jason Mraz- I'm yours.**


	12. Chapter 11b: Las Vegas Nights

_**CHAPTER 11b- LAS VEGAS NIGHTS.**_

Eventually Derek regained his ability to speak, and managed to let go of Meredith long enough to wheel her bag into the room and close the door- just looking at her, making sure she was really there and she wasn't just some figment of his imagination. He watched how she took off her jacket and threw it onto the couch, kicking her shoes off and jumping on the bed, getting comfortable on top of it as she smiled at him, her bangs falling into her eyes as her eyes blinked through the strands of hair. He had wanted her to be there so much, that he almost couldn't believe that she felt that need to be there too.

She smiled wider, raising her eyebrows as if to question him. "So, I fly all the way here on a whim, after a long day at the hospital, and all you can do is stand six feet away from me?" Meredith teased.

He laughed softly, making the one or two strides to the bed, crawling on top of it, pulling Meredith into his arms, just enjoying the feel of her weight in his arms as she let herself completely relax into his embrace. She sighed contentedly, and picked up the remote to the TV, flicking the channels as they sat in silence. There wasn't much they really wanted to say at that moment. They just wanted to enjoy each other being there for a little while.

Derek never would have thought that he would have sought comfort from someone so flighty and nervous as Meredith. She had lost her confidence after they got back together after Addison, and Derek had really wondered whether they could get through the problems Meredith had in her life. But the saying 'what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger' was absolutely true. And that statement _really_ did ring true, what with the bomb exploding, and her drowning.

"So…" Derek started, his voice gravelly, stuck deep in his throat as his socked foot gently rubbed hers. "What made you decide to come?" He asked, moving his head closer to her, so his chin rested on top of her head gently, inhaling her scent.

"I don't really know…" Meredith murmured, her fingers playing with the hem of Derek's shirt that had become untucked. "I just…wanted to do more than speak to you and I guess… I wanted to spend time with you, since I wasn't doing anything better."

"Ha! So you only came here because you had nothing else better to do. Thanks, Meredith. Makes me feel a lot better about myself! Here I was thinking that you missed me, that you couldn't live without me, and now you're telling me you did it to alleviate boredom." Derek joked easily with her, his hand curling round her waist to gently tickle her more ticklish sides of her body.

Somewhere along the line, being with Meredith felt less like work and more like fun, even if it had taken a long time to get there. Derek knew that Meredith was loyal to people that she thought had earned it- he saw that with her friends, with Cristina when Burke had his tremor, with Izzie when she cut Denny's LVAD wire, with Alex when he failed his boards. He felt lucky that Meredith had trusted him again- he wouldn't have blamed her if she couldn't get over his deception about Addison. Any lesser person wouldn't have been able to. He knew that. Somehow all the problems they had faced had become vestiges of the past, something that they had experienced and gotten over.

Derek didn't bog himself down with where this was going, because right now he was happy. Meredith was open with him, she wasn't pushing him away, and they had found a routine with each other that Derek was sure could last the rest of their lives. They had been through more in the past two years than most people faced in a lifetime. He had learned to live this relationship in the present. If Meredith wanted something, he knew she'd get it, make the steps to make sure she'd have it, and he was confident that Meredith's pace was the right one for this relationship.

"Actually…" Meredith's voice pierced the muted sounds from the television. "There was something that made me want to come see you." She said, sitting up slightly so she could look into his eyes, peeling herself a little bit away from Derek's embrace.

Derek looked at her in concern, his brow knitted into a slight frown as his mind raced through possible horror scenarios as to why Meredith needed him. But she was happy. She was one hundred percent contented, this was where she wanted to be, and not out of force of a situation, but out of choice. The corners of her sweet pink lips were upturned into a slight smile, her eyes twinkling with an excitement and tinge of apprehension all at the same time. He could tell she was gearing herself up to tell him something, even though he had no idea what in the world could be serious enough that she booked a last minute flight to Vegas after a long day working at the hospital.

"I came home from work, and I saw that a courier dropped off something, a poster tube whatever on the doorstep. I figured it must be from the architect for the house, and he wrote a letter that the building regulation guys approved the plans, and as soon as we find a contractor, we can break ground and build the house." Meredith told him.

"That's great news, Meredith!" Derek replied happily, pulling her in again for a tight hug.

That was only the literal reason though, not the true reason why she came. She didn't stop herself because she was scared of telling him the real reason, but because expressing her emotions verbally was so alien to her. Kiss him in all the right places, touch all the right body parts, and express yourself physically. That's how she dealt with her feelings. Through sex.

But things had changed. And more importantly, she had changed. If this happened even six months ago, where living in a functioning and communicative relationship with Derek was still a novel idea, and a huge step for her, she would have sulked and bitched that she wasn't being recognised by being asked to be at the presentation, she wouldn't have wanted to show Derek how much she wanted to be with him by booking a ticket to come to Vegas, and even if she had, she would have jumped on top of him, wrestled him to the bed, and would have had sex with him. It wasn't that that intimate part of their relationship was any less, or not as important, but Meredith was learning to communicate through words, through speaking her mind, and knowing Derek would be there to listen to it, even if it were things he didn't want to hear.

So when she had something good to say, she should just say it.

"And then for the first time ever, I actually looked at it. I don't mean at the rooms, and the way the kitchen spans an inordinate amount of the downstairs just so it can be at the front, back and whole side of the house, I mean I really looked at it, and realised what it meant. There are kids rooms in that house, Derek. Our kids. There's a walk out basement to a smaller flower garden, where we can invite friends for a lazy barbeque on a Saturday afternoon in the summer. There are his n' hers basins in our bathroom…we've actually thought about this. Our future is written all over those blueprints, and some guy in some office has approved it." Meredith said reverently.

Derek pulled her back towards him, waiting for Meredith to finish. There was more to it than the official approval to the 'McMansion' as Cristina had affectionately dubbed it, and as always, with the McSteamy and McDreamy thing, everyone had started using that term.

"Remember when I laid out those candles of our house, and I said I'd try and trust you? I'm done trying. I know. I know I want that future with you, and I trust you. It's more than that next step to me Derek. Building a house together, planning it with a view to it belonging to both of us for forever, it's everything. And I really think we can have that everything- me and you both." She continued. "It's really our forever Derek…" She almost whispered.

That was the first time Meredith had admitted that to herself without having any doubts. She wasn't expecting it to fail, wondering if she was capable of this- she knew that things that were worth having weren't easy to come by.

Then it hit her- she knew now what it meant, what that feeling was inside of her that prompted her to fly to Vegas to be feeling her skin on his as she conveyed her feelings to him. She knew that it was something big, she knew that it was something more than she could understand while booking the ticket to fly out to see him, but it made sense now. It didn't matter that her mother never had it, that Meredith almost believed that she couldn't have it either. Because she could if she tried.

Finally, for the first time, she maybe even truly trusted herself. Maybe that's what was missing all this time. She had a clarity in her mind.

Meredith swallowed before she spoke, her throat suddenly dry as her words stuck there. She wasn't sure her words would come out, but she opened her mouth and hoped some kind on intelligible sound would come out. "I want to marry you. I want to have kids with you. I want to build us a house. I want to settle down and grow old with you. I want to die when I'm 110 years old in your arms. I don't want 48 uninterrupted hours. I want a lifetime. Will you marry me?"

She repeated the lines that Derek had told her all those months ago, the ones that made her recoil in fear. But now she was saying them to him, and she meant every single word. They were said from the bottom of her heart, and those words were ingrained into her memory, she was adamant she wouldn't say them until she really believed them. Now she said them, and she felt…light. As she had achieved everything she had been working towards these past few months.

Forty eight uninterrupted hours- how ironic that the Vegas trip was exactly that. But Derek was taken aback with the force at which Meredith delivered the words he once gave to her, hoping that his honesty would draw all the doubt she had out, and replace it with hope and belief. He had done it- they had done it. They had taken all those steps to get there.

"Mer…" Her name got petered out in his throat, as his voice hitched as he tried not to cry. It was one of those moments where the rest of the world fell away, where nothing else mattered but Meredith and him, sitting on that bed as Meredith admitted everything he once not-so-long-ago never thought would happen.

"I mean it, Derek." Meredith said, turning onto her side, leaning her weight onto him as she held his face in her hands, her fingers gently tracing his jawline. "I want forever with you. Let's get married here in Vegas. Now."

Derek's eyes widened in shock, seeing the resolution in Meredith's expression and in her touch. She really meant it, she wanted to get married in Las Vegas. "Now?" He whispered, his hands coming up to his face to meet hers.

Now was…soon. But he wanted it, right? Building a house with someone, planning it and falling in love with it, guessing how many kids they would have, designing a balcony to their bedroom so they could watch the sunrise off the sound in the morning off the cliff… they had done that together. That was more permanent than any marriage. In the past few months, Derek had a glimpse into what domestic 'harmony' was with Meredith, and it was great. At one time, it was virtually an impossibility.

"Now…" He repeated again, in shock. "But there's supposed to be a proposal, a diamond ring, I have to get down on my knee. There has to be a dress, and…" Meredith silenced him, a finger moving from his jaw to cover his lips. She leaned forward, replacing her finger for her lips, kissing him softly, trying to reassure him.

"Would it make you feel any different about me? If you had the ring, and the perfect words?" Meredith asked him softly, yet confidently.

Derek shook his head. "No…" he answered quietly.

"I don't need the ring…or the dress. All I need is you, and what I have in here." She took his hand and guided it to her heart.

Nothing he and Meredith did together was conventional, they never did things the right way round, and for most of the time, it worked for them. Derek knew that having the fairytale dream wedding didn't mean that the marriage would be any more successful than a quickie one in Las Vegas, it was the sentiments shared at the wedding that made the difference, it mattered if you honoured the vows you said on your wedding day, not how much you spent.

He knew Meredith well by now, and really believed that she really didn't need the dress or the diamond ring, and it held no value to her, and that's why he loved her. She was so unlike any other person he knew, and he got infuriated with and loved that quality in her all at the same time. Derek had been ready to marry her for a long time, and had been waiting. He hadn't allowed himself to get to that stage in case Meredith never got there, conditioning himself to the thought that living with her in her mother's house might have been the furthest they'd ever get. Just because you designed kid's rooms on paper didn't mean that they would happen. But somewhere Meredith had got to that place where the thought of marriage and commitment didn't scare her shitless.

Cristina's non-wedding had affected Meredith's outlook on that typical happy-ever-after profoundly. Meredith didn't think that the conventional fanfare made for a real wedding- one where the vows mean something, where it's two people making the ultimate commitment. All Meredith saw was mother-in-laws taking away your eyebrows, being forced into traditions you didn't want to uphold and say scary vows that you weren't sure the meaning of. Derek knew that- and he agreed with it. Meredith was still quite a flighty character, and Derek knew that she had to really want it to suggest it. He had been ready for a long time.

They were ever the unconventional couple.

"Ok…" Derek whispered. "Let's do it. Let's get married."

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Derek woke up with Meredith's face buried in his chest, his arms surrounding her as they slept. Derek peered at the time on his cell phone, taking one of his hands off Meredith to rub his eyes tiredly. They had celebrated their 'engagement' _a lot_ last night, and it was just another reminder for Derek that he wasn't in his twenties anymore- far from it. Now he needed sleep- he wasn't a resident where sleep deprivation was a part of life, and Derek was sure that he'd be paying for it later. Meredith's snore rumbled against his bare chest, her fingers clutching the bedsheets as she slept.

There was no guilt in missing this second day of the conference, because it was his wedding day. Come midnight that night, he and Meredith would be married. The realisation hadn't quite hit him yet, but when it did, it would hit him like a freight train. Derek wondered what would happen to Meredith when she realised what she was doing… but he was pretty sure she wouldn't run away. Running was a thing of the past for her now. She still avoided issues, but she was still present in her avoidance. Often, when she was the one to make the move, like the house of candles, asking Derek to move in, asking him to give her time, she knew what she was getting herself in for.

"Mer…" Derek coaxed Meredith out of her sleep gently, rubbing her back as he kissed the top of her head, his voice low and rumbling. "Come on, wake up…"

After some unintelligible sounds and rolling over in the opposite direction, gentle kisses along her bare shoulders persuaded Meredith that being awake might just be a better option than sleeping. She rolled onto her back again, as Derek peppered kisses across her collar bones. She opened her eyes, green magnetically finding blue as they met each other's gaze. Derek leaned away, propping his head up with his hand, as his free hand brushed her hair behind her ear, all muzzed during the night.

"Good morning, my beautiful fiancée." He smiled lazily,dipping his head down for a kiss.

"This has to be one of the shortest engagements ever." Meredith laughed sleepily, hooking her arms around Derek's neck, using the little body weight she had to roll Derek over onto his back as she lay on top of him. "But it doesn't make any difference. If we waited one day or one year, I'd still want to marry you. The feelings are exactly the same."

Keeping her fingers nestled at the little curls at the nape of his neck, she rested her head on his warm chest, sighing contentedly. "I love you, Derek."

It took her a long time to say it, but after that first time after their make up sex, she'd been telling him that she loved him all the time. He smiled as he twisted his fingers into the strands of her hair as they enjoyed the quite moment of the day before the chaos started. She'd said 'I love you' so many times in so many ways. There were the quick ones in the morning, usually rushed with a quick peck on the cheek as she poured coffee into a travel mug, the ones that end a phone conversation just in-case one of them died, so that the last thing she ever told him was that she loved him (Derek tried to convince her that was a little morbid, but Meredith thought there was some romanticism in it- he didn't argue that hard; it was just another excuse to hear that wonderful phrase from her lips again.) There were the admissions of love as hushed whispers in the dark, as they held each other in each other's arms as they fell asleep, the passionate utterances during their love making, which came out as a low sensual groan. There were the teasing 'I love you's, laced with just the right amount of sarcasm for it still to be true. And Derek didn't have a favourite one, because all of them were different types of love, and they collectively made up everything Derek loved about his relationship with Meredith, who had begun to snore lightly again as she fell asleep.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Luckily, Derek had the foresight to print out the wedding licence application online, so all they'd need to do was wait in line to get it. Derek had gotten more and more excited about the prospect of marrying Meredith as time went on. Meredith still caught the wary glances he shot her way, making sure she wasn't wanting to back out of this. Meredith tried to give him what she considered her most reassuring of smiles, and hoped he bought it. Because she had really meant it. She wanted to get married.

For goodness sake, it wasn't as if she had never thought of it before. She might have had her fair string of one night stands before Derek, she was never one of those people who thought that every guy she was with could be 'the one' , she hadn't ever really wanted one either. But then she met Derek, and she bought into the whole relationship idea, after a lot of coaxing. They were building a house together, and she may not have wanted any of those things before, but she knew that it would have lead to marriage eventually. That eventually was now. If they were discussing kid's bedrooms and office space, they could get married.

Meredith knew Derek wanted this too, for a long time, even if he had expected it in a more conventional way. He had told her the day she drowned in an off-handed way 'do you want to get married?' …and then once again with the speech at the elevator. Derek believed in marriage despite being married once before, and having that marriage fail. He believed in soulmates, and Meredith didn't know what she believed.

Meredith hadn't really seen marriage work. Her mother always treated hers as a dire mistake- and Meredith was the constant reminder to that failure- one blemish on Ellis Grey's life. Meredith had since found out exactly why Ellis felt that way- that Ellis thought that the prospect of looking after someone else's child was too much for Richard Webber, and he chickened out. However, it took trying in a relationship with Derek, learning how to love with him in the same house day in, day out for her to realise that a certain element of Richard staying with his wife would have been Ellis's attitude towards life. Everything was an obstruction to surgery- a goal in her life that she gave everything up to achieve. And yet it was ironic, because Meredith knew that if there was anyone in this world that would have been capable of taming her mother, it would have been Richard.

Getting a cab from the resort to the marriage licence bureau, they had driven up the strip, passing all the wedding chapels and potential places where they could tie the knot. Meredith held Derek's hand tightly as she peered out of the window, wondering which on they would choose. They saw couples walk into the chapels to get married, and likewise others coming out as husband and wife. Maybe Meredith was buying into this idea more than Derek gave her credit for.

Waiting for their turn to get a licence, Derek watched as Meredith looked at all the other couples in line. Most of them would be getting married too. Even though Meredith said she wanted to get married, and she acted like she did, there was still this niggling little doubt in the back of Derek's mind that that was what she really wanted. Because Meredith had been scared of commitment for such a long time, the idea of a happy marriage had been such an alien concept, Derek wasn't sure that she would ever want it, and he would have had to be the one pushing her, not this way round.

"So…being surrounded by all this wedding atmosphere…is that vicarious pleasure enough? Or do you think it might put some people off? " Derek teased Meredith, nudging her affectionately.

"Sure" Meredith replied sarcastically, rolling her eyes "I think the sheer number of casinos in a one mile radius really puts people off gambling their life savings away."

She really wanted this.

Her decision to get married in Vegas didn't mean she considered it to be a trivial thing- she really just wanted to do it quietly. But the thing was- maybe it was too quiet. He intended on this being the last time he would ever get married, and he didn't want either him or Meredith to wish they had done things differently. He had already had the wedding with all the family, the tuxedo and cake, the wedding photographer and best man- but Meredith hadn't.

Derek leaned down, putting his lips to Meredith's ear. "I think you should call Cristina and let her know what we're doing…maybe even invite her down here to witness this." Derek whispered, squeezing Meredith's hand reassuringly as he spoke.

Meredith turned her head quickly towards him, eyebrows darting up in surprise at Derek's offer. So many unspoken questions flashed across her face. Derek just gave her a small smile. "She's your family, Meredith. I know she's important to you. You'll need her." He explained.

"What about you?" Meredith asked him. "Don't you want Mark here with you? To be your best man?"

Although Derek would have said that his friendship with Mark was now totally healed, and they were even able to talk and sometimes joke about Mark and Addison, Derek was affected deep down. There were somethings that were private- and this felt like one of them. He couldn't implicitly trust Mark anymore, not like how Meredith trusted Cristina.

"Last time he was my best man, it didn't end so well did it?" Derek joked, his smile weaker than he intended. Of course it still hurt that both his wife and his best friend had cheated on him. And to think, Meredith thought she had trust issues. So did he. The two people he was supposed to trust most in the world had betrayed him, and he couldn't really heal from that. But every dark cloud has a silver lining, and if that had never have happened, he would never have met Meredith, so with hindsight, it all worked out.

"Derek, I would never…" Meredith hastily told him. And she wouldn't. She never understood why people cheated. If it was so bad you couldn't be faithful, why didn't people just break up with their partner before they strayed? If only Derek knew about that time in the scrub room, where Mark suggested a meeting in the on-call room to heal their pain, he would have given Mark a punch on the other eye.

Derek kissed her on the lips to silence her. "I know you wouldn't…" He said confidently. "But I don't need him here, you need Cristina, Meredith. If you don't invite her out, I think you'd regret it."

Derek continued smiling as Meredith contemplated it. Meredith may have looked like she wanted it right now, but he was sure sooner rather than later she'd have a moment of doubt, as everyone did, and Cristina would be one of the only people to be able to talk her down from that panic. Also- Cristina may never have forgiven her if they just got married without telling her, there were somethings that people as close as Meredith and Cristina were that just needed to be said.

Grabbing her phone from her pocket, Meredith dialled Cristina's number, smiling gratefully at Derek while she waited for her friend to pick up. That was why Meredith knew that marriage would work for them, why it was the right thing to do. Derek knew her and understood her needs better than she knew them herself. Meredith hadn't even considered it until he mentioned it, and once he did, she did feel like it was the right thing to do. She did need to call Cristina and at least let her know that she was going to do this. She knew Cristina and Derek didn't have the easiest of relationships, that for the longest time Cristina was wary and untrusting of Derek when Meredith agreed to having a relationship with him- all she wanted to do was protect her best friend. And somewhere along the way, the two called some kind of truce, silently recognising that hating each other wasn't achieving anything- and was making the person they cared about torn between both of them.

"How's Las Vegas? Got married in 'Elvis's chapel of Love' yet?" Cristina asked her friend, skipping all the pleasantries like 'hi' and 'how are you?'

"Actually…" Meredith began guiltily "we're waiting in line for a marriage licence right now. And we were wondering of you want to be a witness."

Cristina was momentarily stunned, and for once was unable to speak. Meredith wondered whether this silence was a good or a bad thing. Cristina had been burned once by the idea of marriage, and Meredith had begun to think that Cristina wasn't so sure if marriage was for her- and Meredith was never really bothered by it- until she decided she wanted it.

"I'll book the next flight out. I'll text you my details." Cristina eventually told her friend, hanging up abruptly.

___________________________________________________________________________________

The next few hours until Cristina's flight landed went in a blur. After their licence was processed, Derek had taken her to a jewellery store in one of the malls. All she could see were cases and cases of rings, and so many types to choose from. Gold, white gold, platinum… none of them jumped out to her. All she could feel was Derek's supportive hand resting on the small of her back as she leaned against one of the glass cases, her hand flat against the cool glass, creating a misty mark when she took it off the case to try on a ring Derek suggested.

"What do you think?" Derek's voice reached her ears, warm and comforting in this otherwise overwhelming situation. That's all that mattered. Derek. That's what she was here for, and the ring was only a sign of their commitment. Meredith in her mind had already made that promise to him when she asked him to marry her, she wasn't reneging on that promise, on those intended vows, but rings, and types, and prices and sizes- it made it less about what was going on in her head and more about the public declaration part of the wedding.

Derek casually slipped it on her finger, and she could feel the cool metal band surround her finger perfectly. Her eyes flashed from the ring on her finger to Derek, who was watching her carefully, but still had a wide smile on his face. Meredith looked back to the ring again, wondering how this was actually happening, hardly believing that barely twelve hours ago she had told him she wanted to get married and now they were buying rings with a wedding licence in Derek's pocket. Her right hand fell to her left ring finger, rotating the plain platinum band around her finger, as she imagined it being there forever, and what that meant to her, what the ring symbolised.

Derek knew Meredith was thinking, thinking about what the ring meant, and he was giving Meredith time to come to terms with it. He was confident now that even though Meredith would be scared, she had learned how to overcome it, and become stronger because of that doubt, that it gave her the conviction to go for what she really wanted rather than run away. They had worked through that together, and he had been there for her when she needed him to.

After pondering a little more, Meredith slipped off the ring, and placed it on the glass cabinet, fidgeting with her fingers as she looked at it a little longer, next to a bigger matching band for Derek. That ring on her finger felt right, and it gave her a sense of belonging, of achievement, that despite being told that forming relationships with men was worthless by her mother, she had found it to be the best thing she had ever done. She wasn't defined by her relationship with Derek – she was in it because she wanted to be, and committing to him, showing the world she was married to him was something worthwhile.

Looking up at Derek, she took her hand in his, which lay casually on the edge of the counter, her fingers intertwining with his. "I like it." She said quietly, smiling.

"You don't want one with diamonds?" Derek asked, preparing to usher her to the cabinets with different styles of ring. "I mean, you can get whatever you want, I really don't mind."

"Tiny, tiny diamonds?" Meredith joked, remembering Izzie's comment when George and Callie had their disaster wedding in Vegas.

"That's one marriage I really have no intention of emulating." Derek replied, laughing. "Oh god, they got married in Vegas too, didn't they?" His eyes flew wide open at his realisation, eyes shining with laughter.

"Not the same, Derek." Meredith replied, mock-annoyed, as she nudged him. "No. No diamonds. I like the plain band- it's simple, clean…it does everything it's supposed to. Let's just get them. Cristina will be arriving in an hour or two."

And Meredith meant that. She really did admire the simplicity in the ring, and it was the complete opposite of what they went through to get to this point, which was horribly drawn-out, complicated, messy…and now, they were at a point in their relationship that felt stronger than ever. It wasn't like Callie and George's wedding, because even though it was a spontaneous decision, Meredith had been building herself up to this for a long time- since the house of candles. She had tried to make herself not run from any bump in the road with Derek, and it had paid off.

They decided on just engraving the date inside the ring, and wandered through the shops as they waited. They walked side by side, stepping in perfect time with each other, holding hands lightly as they commented on all the stores, and people. This was easy, the way it was meant to be, and it could have been easy to forget all the hard times they had been through to get to this point, but without all of the hardships, maybe this good part wouldn't have felt so great, so rewarding.

Derek had tried to convince Meredith to buy any dress she wanted, but she was adamant that she'd get married in that black Ralph Lauren dress. She had to wear it to something, and her wedding seemed like the most appropriate occasion. Her rebellious streak was showing with this whole wedding thing. Pink-haired Meredith was sticking her finger up to all conventional traditions and doing it her way. She didn't want a normal wedding, she wanted what she wanted, and as long as they said their vows and signed the paper, it didn't matter what else happened. She'd be happy in her black dress, just as long as Derek was there with her.

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"Hey Mer!" Meredith heard Cristina's voice call her through the crowd at the airport as she carried what looked to be a medium size army backpack on her shoulders.

Derek flashed a bemused look as he saw an embroidered 'HUNT' patch on it like he expected- seemed like one other person knew about the elopement too- which he didn't mind. At least Owen has something none of the others seemed capable of- professionalism. Maybe it was his sense of right and wrong, of being in the army and knowing not to disclose sensitive information, but he was able to separate his personal and professional life. He didn't favour Cristina when working with her- she was just his resident and he was her attending, and if Derek was to guess, he would suspect that was the thing Cristina liked most about him.

He shook his head as the two friends didn't even exchange a hug, but seemed to be talking about something… the words 'Shepherd' and 'getting hitched' hung in the air. Now that someone else was talking about it besides himself and Meredith- it felt real. Their bubble had been somewhat popped and the realisation came that once they landed in Seattle, they would be functioning as husband and wife- it wasn't just part of the Vegas madness.

"So I brought a dress…anything else?" Cristina asked both of them.

Meredith laughed. "Nope. I don't have much else myself…"

"At least tell me you have rings?" Cristina rolled her eyes.

"Yes." Derek replied emphatically, showing her the boxes he had in his pants pocket.

"Hmm… interesting…" Cristina said in a low voice as she inspected them. "It's already four…what if we don't get a slot until midnight? Then this wont actually BE your wedding day, and you'll be a day out. I mean, did you even decide on a wedding chapel?"

The gasp that came out of Meredith's lips indicated that they hadn't. "Maybe we should embrace the tacky- you know, get married in an Elvis themed place."

"I'm all for the wedding in Vegas , Mer, really, but I absolutely draw the line at getting married by an Elvis impersonator, even if the Graceland wedding chapel worked for Bon Jovi."

Cristina shrugged. "I don't know, I mean… you're already doing one of the tackiest things you can possibly do, getting married in this town, I think you should go all out. What about that drive thru wedding chapel on the strip?"

"I'm getting married, Cristina, not ordering a big mac and fries." Meredith rolled her eyes. This was beginning to frustrate her. They decision to come and visit Derek in Las Vegas was easy, the decision to marry him was simple, and yet deciding _where_ they would get married was proving the most debated question.

Derek could see Meredith get ever so slightly freaked out and stressed at not being able to find a place to get married. And yet the ironic thing was that it didn't really matter where they got married- not anymore. He may have had some kind of ideas of where he wanted to get married to her before- maybe on a summer's day on their land where for once they could forget their baggage and live in the moment, and yet Derek realised that _THIS_ was Meredith living in the moment. As for the baggage- Derek, they would never be rid of that- the battle scars were plain for all to see, and Derek was proud of that. Any other couple probably wouldn't have made it through so many obstacles as they had done, and to get here was momentous. As her future husband, it was Derek's duty to calm her down.

"Look, it doesn't matter. Let's just get back to the hotel, freshen up, get dressed, and then we'll just drive up and down the strip a few times until we find a place that feels right, ok?" Derek said, giving Meredith a reassuring smile.

___________________________________________________________________________________

"Nice dress, Mer…" Cristina complimented her friend, as Meredith smoothed out invisible wrinkles out of her never- worn black dress, running her hands through her wavy blonde hair.

Meredith smiled back as a thankyou. Cristina wasn't a bullshitter. That's why they got on so well- she told it like it was, and that truth was painful sometimes. But at times like these- where Meredith was making one of the biggest steps of her life- she needed her friend there. This wasn't just about her and Derek as a couple, this was about Meredith and what it took from her in terms of personal growth to get to this point, to make this kind of commitment to Derek, to initiate it. This was almost like a double celebration. She had gotten to the top of the board and managed to dodge the huge proverbial snake on the last square.

Meredith had this feeling that maybe this whole getting married thing wasn't supposed to be as simple as this was feeling- Derek was currently in the bathroom, getting ready and putting on his suit to get married in, and she was sitting there in her black dress that she threw into her suitcase as an afterthought, with Cristina by her side, hunched over Derek's laptop, deciding which cheesy wedding chapel she wanted to get married in. There was no obsessing about seating plans, and flower arrangements, there was no worrying about catering, wedding dress alterations. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. But then again, wasn't that the whole point? Wasn't that why her subconscious thought it was such a brilliant idea to do it this way? There was such a thing as having too much choice. She just wanted to say her vows to Derek, and prove to herself and everyone else that Meredith Grey actually _WAS_ capable of making scary commitments to the guy who let her down, whom she had let down, and who both had the strength to work through it.

"I don't see how you can decide to get married in a split second, and then spend a whole hour scrolling through chapels and not even have a shortlist!" Cristina complained, getting up from her chair to walk out to the balcony when she got a call from Owen.

If Meredith was honest, she couldn't really understand that logic either, and finally at the height of her frustration, intensified with Cristina's growing impatience, she grabbed a pamphlet in the pile that the hotel provided on the desk beside her and opened it up, showing a map of wedding chapels on the strip. She grabbed a pen, closed her eyes, and jabbed the tip of her pen onto the paper.

"Little white wedding chapel it is, then." She heard Derek say over her shoulder as he fiddled with the cufflinks on his sleeve.

"You're really ok with this? You're not frightened or dismayed by the lack of class this shows?" Meredith asked him worriedly. "Am I just…I dunno…distracting myself from the gravity of the commitment by rushing it?" Meredith asked, lowering her voice to a whisper. "Am I cheapening it?"

"Meredith…no." Derek replied, the volume of his voice matching Meredith's. " Some people, they have the big expensive poufy white dress, the perfect venues, hundreds of guests and professional albums, and what they have inside, their resolve to make it work, the sentiments…that's all hollow. We're not making it about the wedding, we're making it about the marriage. It's about the piece of paper, and not where we sign it. I'm just happy I'm getting married to you."

The sliding door squeaked open, and Crsitina came back inside, unaware of the heart-to-heart Meredith and Derek shared. "Oh cool. So you did choose the chapel with a drive thru. I think you should reconsider, Mer, because think about the expression on people's faces when you tell them you got married on a motorbike."

"Derek doesn't ride motorbikes anymore…" Meredith laughed, as Derek's arm gripped her tighter, as she pointed to the virtually invisible scar on his forehead.

"Aww. McDreamy got his panties in a twist because he scarred his pretty little face?" Cristina asked gleefully.

It had taken some getting used to, but Derek realised that it was just Cristina's way. She cared for Meredith maybe as much as he did, and she was there holding Meredith up when he had damaged her- if a man had done some of the things he had done to Meredith to one of his sisters, he would have said the same things Cristina had. But somewhere along the line he had redeemed himself-although he couldn't be sure how. Cristina was here, and she was supporting them, and that was what mattered.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Another hour and a half later, armed with a digital camera, they were waiting outside the chapel, and surprisingly, Meredith was a picture of zen. Maybe it was because all of this was on her terms, within her realms of comfortability, and she wasn't coerced into any of this. Derek almost laughed to himself when he thought of how she was more undone by Cristina's wedding than she was by her own. And that's why this all felt right, because they were getting married in the purest way in the cheesiest place on earth.

Armed with her digital camera, Cristina took Meredith to the side as their names were called out to enter the chapel.

This was it. Panic was starting to come into Meredith's eyes, her heart beating a little faster as they were about to enter the chapel. No going back. It was one of those moments where her life was going to change forever, this was a step in her life that was once a distant hope and now she was there.

"Mer…" Cristina said, grabbing her friend's arm and leading her to a corner. "This is it. And for the love of god, stop being so scared! You don't have your mother here, a scary momma who waxed your eyebrows off, this is… this is your city hall. You're getting your city hall, and more miraculously, your boyfriend is actually listening to what you want. Do you know how special that is? If… if Burke had given that to me, just me, him you and Shepherd at city hall-maybe…maybe things would have been different. I wouldn't have had to change, he wouldn't have tried to change me, he wouldn't have felt guilty that he was making me leap so high for him. Derek- he's a good guy who made some stupid mistakes trying to be a good guy. Prove that marriage is more than just the fuss."

Cristina was right. She could do this, and she was doing this right. If she had to do this in Vegas to avoid doing it the way she absolutely didn't want to do it- where it was less about them and the celebration that they had gotten this far, and more about all the other crap, then she had to do it this way. There were so many factors to why a marriage wouldn't work out- and over the past two and a half years, she had been through most of them with Derek.

Meredith walked up to Derek, smiling up at him as she kissed him on the lips lightly, looking deep into his eyes that conveyed nothing but love and commitment to her. "Let's do this thing." She whispered, grabbing his hand as the chapel doors opened.

Once they were in there, everything was a blur, a mish-mash of emotions and memories, past and present. It didn't matter that the whole room was possibly decorated in the worst taste any of them had ever seen, because what Meredith and Derek were doing, the promises they were making to each other were special. The thing about Cristina and Meredith was- they weren't wedding people. But they were marriage people. They bought into the whole idea of loving only one person for the rest of their life, committing to them, and being with them through everything, but they didn't want to be a princess for the day, be the bride that everyone stared at.

Growing up, Meredith was too busy playing with her anatomy Jane doll to dream up fairytale weddings. She didn't have a mom as a role model, she had Ellis. She wanted to be a doctor who saved lives when no one else could. She had fulfilled that dream, and now she was fulfilling one she never imagined she had until she said it. This was going against everything everyone thought about her. Meredith Grey would never commit. Meredith Grey could never get married. Meredith Grey wouldn't be able to keep Derek Shepherd forever- she didn't know how to give him what he wanted. And yet here she was, doing it, without them knowing, and it gave her a sense of power and control over herself that infinite hours of therapy with Dr. Wyatt would never provide.

Just Meredith, Derek, Cristina, another paid witness and the minister- they were the only people that filled the small chapel. There was Derek, hand in hand with Meredith, reciting the same vows he said to Addison all those years ago, but this second time round, he knew what they meant, and this time he said them with a lot more conviction than the first time. In this second wedding, there were no personal vows with cheesy lines about how much they meant to each other, because what mattered was that they were there, doing it. It mattered that Meredith would be wearing his ring, and he'd be wearing hers. It mattered that on Monday he'd call the contractor, and they'd start building their house and shop for furniture. He realised what would make and break this relationship, he understood Meredith so well.

With only the five of them in this chapel, the privacy and intimacy of the moment wasn't lost on Derek, even if the witness that would sign his wedding certificate was a total stranger. In fact, it made it more about Meredith and Derek as a couple, just two people who loved each other and uniting, rather than the fuss of the wedding. It was a refreshing change from the 'Meredith and Derek show' in Seattle, they weren't being put under the microscope by anyone, they weren't being watched for any hints of cracking. People just accepted them as a couple who wanted to get married. They didn't know Derek hid his wife from Meredith, that Meredith had no role model for marriage, of all the things they had been through to get here. That was just between them- and Cristina.

That's why Meredith was here. She was making that final step- the final commitment. She wasn't really sure what that would mean, but she didn't think she would until she did. It would be many things that made her realise there was something else more in a marriage than just living together- she hoped it would bring more to their relationship, shift them onto something higher. Even though she hadn't seen a marriage work, she still believed it could for her and Derek- because what problem couldn't they face together? They cured and incurable condition, Derek had revived her for twenty minutes when she drowned.

"Meredith…" Derek whispered, before he recited his vows. His fingers gripped hers, both of their palms clammy as his thumb gently ran over the back of her hand over and over, in a soothing rhythm in time with his voice. He was promising everything, to be there always no matter what. And that's why she was marrying him now, there in Vegas. Because she already _knew_ he'd do all those things for her, and she would for him.

Meredith's voice became shaky, willing herself to contain herself long enough to say the vows back to Derek. Tears blurred her vision, but even then, she could swear Derek was crying too. She could feel him wrench his hand out of her grip, and then seconds later felt him wipe the tears from her face so she could see him more clearly, his blue eyes tearing up as he said "I do." He said it softly, almost reverently, as if it were a prayer, only meant for her to hear.

Meredith's eyes eventually met Cristina's, and she could see that even Cristina had tears pooling in her eyes. Meredith had proved that women like her _could_ have this without having to have everything else. They were capable of loving someone else, and committing to them, marrying someone and have it be about the marriage rather than the wedding. They had come a long way, been through a lot of doubt and arguing to get this far, but Derek was absolutely right. It wouldn't have been the same for Meredith if Cristina hadn't been there to share in that moment.

Ring were exchanged, shiny reminders of the commitment they had just made to each other. Just simple platinum wedding bands, understated symbols of their marriage. Meredith looked up again at Derek as he embraced her, his left hand on hers, and she could feel the tension drain out of Derek's body. They had actually done it. They had gotten married, even though it wasn't conventional, even if Derek was just in a dark suit and crisp white shirt with no tie, even if Meredith was in a black dress she found in her closet, even though her best friend Cristina was in her dress she wore at prom two years. It didn't matter, because that moment was still magical, and Meredith couldn't imagine anything else could feel that perfect.

___________________________________________________________________________________

"I have to say, it wasn't bad for a quickie wedding." Cristina said, scrawling her signature across the wedding certificate, acting as the main witness. "Clean, in and out no fuss. Like a textbook surgery."

Meredith could feel Derek's chest rumble against her as he held her tightly. She was his. He was hers. And before, Meredith was sure she thought that really marriage was only a bit of paper, that getting married wouldn't change the way she felt about Derek. But now she had that piece of paper in her hand, and it was in writing that they had made that ultimate commitment, it proved that it wasn't all in her head, Derek's love wasn't just some perception in her mind, but it was there in front of her. That marriage certificate was everything.

She had a husband. She wasn't quite sure what that really meant to her yet, but it would probably become apparent as time went on. She wasn't supposed to be that person who had a husband, because she wasn't wife material. She didn't have parents as role models who had been married for thirty five years and been happy. She had never seen it work, and took a leap of faith. And for once, it paid off. Derek believed in soulmates, and magic, and maybe she believed in it too.

"What next? Dinner somewhere?" Derek asked happily as they posed for a cheesy picture taken by the minister, while Cristina clicked away on the digital camera she had brought with her.

"Are you kidding me?" Cristina grimaced. "Watching you two undress each other with your eyes while I'm trying to eat some good steak's gonna put me off. Drop me off at the casino. I'm gonna make a killing on those slot machines."

"You know, consummating the marriage _DOES_ sound like the most fun part of the wedding." Meredith whispered in Derek's ear seductively, putting her arm into Derek's jacket and hooking it round his torso, her fingertips feathering his side, leaving a trail of heat.

And then Derek really actually looked at her. His wife. He noticed the simple hairstyle, the way the naturally gentle waves framed her flawless face, how a small contented smile graced her features as her eyes shone with something Derek couldn't describe, but he was sure he felt it too. His eyes trailed down the long column of her neck, down to the low cut of the dress, perfectly framing all the contours of her body his hands and lips had explored time and time again. And then he saw the simple ring decorating her finger as it reflected the gaudy lights in the room.

He swore he fell in love with her all over again.

"Meet us at the hotel for brunch tomorrow." Derek told Cristina distractedly as he watched Meredith.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Meredith opened her eyes slowly, afraid that this feeling was not real, that someone would pinch her, and the past twenty four hours were just a dream. But no. Derek was there, above her, watching her, loving her, smiling down at her with a heavy lidded sated gaze. Meredith exhaled slowly, her hand reaching up to push back a sweaty curl from his forehead. Her hand raked through his raven black hair, sticking up in all directions from the…friction…of a few minutes before. It trailed down his body, resting somewhere on his lower back, as her fingertips absently traced small circles on his smooth skin.

"I love you." Meredith said for the hundredth time since they had exchanged vows just a few hours ago.

Derek rolled onto his side, still holding her tightly against his naked body as his head fell onto the pillow. "Mmm." Derek's voice reverberated against her neck. "Love you too."

Is this what true happiness felt like? Was this what not having a care in the world was actually about? Her mother was wrong. Meredith would give everything up in a second to feel like this forever. This was worth it, maybe this was what being a passionate force of nature could achieve. If she could bottle this feeling of complete contentment, she'd be rich.

"Let's not tell anyone for a little while." Meredith found herself saying to Derek. "I mean, we share a house with roommates, everyone at the hospital has their noses in our business, everything we do it public. Let's just keep this private for a little while, and if people find out, then that's different. I just…let's not tell anyone yet. Let's keep it a secret for a few days."

He understood why she wanted to keep it to themselves, and it wasn't because she was embarrassed, that she didn't want to be his wife. But Meredith Grey and Derek Shepherd were considered legends, and their history was known to everyone. Sometimes living up to that title, or even just having the burden of that title put a strain on them. Don't fight in the hallways, you'll be stared at for a week. Don't get caught going into an on-call-room with Meredith, people will smirk at you for days. Being yourself and not being yourself all at the same time was tiring. Izzie would be overly perky about it, and Alex would make jokes. Derek just didn't want to have to justify the impulsive decision just yet. He just wanted to celebrate it with Meredith.

"Ok…" Derek whispered, his fingers gently feathering across her bare stomach under the sheets, leaving what felt like a trail of fire on her skin, igniting feelings Meredith didn't think were possible. "But I must admit, I'm a little annoyed with you…" Derek added, his hand finding hers.

Meredith's eyes popped open again, finding his, which for one of those rare times, told her nothing. They were flat, almost emotionless, and if Meredith didn't know any better, she could have sworn he was trying to keep them that way. "Annoyed?" She asked, trying to keep the panic from her tone.

"Yeah. You didn't tell me you love me today…" He pouted, not able to control the smirk on his lips as he said it, picking up his head to kiss her on the lips.

"I just said…." Meredith began indignantly, peeking at the clock at the side of the bed. Twelve o'clock. Midnight. The start of a whole new day, the first whole day as husband and wife. Next thing she knew her expression matched his, smirking as she rolled on top of him, effectively pinning him down, and he wasn't resisting.

"I love you." She said against his lips.

Meredith couldn't be sure he answered, but it didn't matter. His kiss spoke a thousand 'I love yous.'

*****************************

_**You've got magic inside your finger tips  
It's leaking out all over my skin  
Every time that I get close to you  
Your making me weak with the way you  
Look through those eyes**_

And all I see is your face  
All I need is your touch  
Wake me up with your lips  
Come at me from up above  
Yeah, oh I need you

I remember the way that you move  
You're dancing easily through my dreams  
It's hitting me harder and harder with all your smiles  
You are crazy gentle in the way you kiss

All I see is your face  
All I need is your touch  
Wake me up with your lips  
Come at me from up above

Oh baby I need you  
To see me, the way I see you  
Lovely, wide awake in  
The middle of my dreams

And all I see is your face  
All I need is your touch  
Wake me up with your lips  
Come at me from up above

_**I need you.  
**_

**Colbie Caillat-Magic.**_**  
**_


	13. Chapter 12: The Luckiest

_**CHAPTER 12: THE LUCKIEST.**_

Meredith was sure she should be paying more attention, soaking up the moment for what it was, but everything was going past in a blur. The food, the music, the conversation, all muted and hazy as she sat there in her chair. This is why her subconscious told her to get married in Las Vegas. Because this kind of attention on her, where she was told about true love, where everything was coated with a sugary romantic optimism which at the best time of times, Meredith was sceptical about-- that attention almost embarrassed her. This was her delayed wedding reception 'stroke' new year's party. She should be enjoying it more.

She had tried to avoid it. That's why she didn't want to tell anyone. But Izzie saw the ring within minutes, screeched to Alex, called George, and nurses at the hospital honed in like magpies to the matching shiny matching wedding rings that Meredith and Derek were wearing. They had had the conversation on speakerphone to Derek's family, who…weren't shocked, but wanted to celebrate anyway, to do something in New York with the family.

But she had married Derek Shepherd, and there was a part of him that was just itching to celebrate their nuptials somewhere other than a hotel room. He wanted to show her off, and so when he suggested that they have a quasi-wedding reception on new year's eve, she couldn't say no. That was her compromise. He had caught her at a moment of weakness, when they hadn't really seen each other for a week because they were on opposite schedules, and they had celebrated the beginning of the weekend off together with tearing each other's clothes off and having passionate, raw sex. She had been lying on the bed, sweaty and sated, and gloriously naked, trying to catch her breath as her nerve endings tingled. Where was she thinking straight in that moment, and by the time she regained her senses about the wedding reception thing, Derek was already excitedly scrolling through venues and caterers.

"You tricked me." Meredith told Derek flatly, when she had seen the size of the tent on their patch of land in the wilderness of Seattle. He'd said small. His family, her family. But his family was big, and that wasn't even counting close cousins, uncles and aunts. She had married into a family where having three kids was considered smaller than average.

"Have faith, Mer." Derek had laughed at her, his gloved hand holding hers tightly.

She did have faith. Everyday she had faith in him, in her marriage. She needed something to believe in, because she didn't have a religion to fall back on, she didn't have a supportive family in a conventional sense, and their job required you to believe in something other than the medicine. She had faith in them, had a belief in them, so that even when they were arguing disproportionately about something stupid and small, they would still be able to mumble 'I love you' angrily before they went to sleep-- and mean it.

There was something in having all the attention on her that made Meredith uncomfortable. People were there on new year's eve to celebrate her marriage to Derek, they brought gifts that Meredith would never have even thought she needed, like full sets of professional cookware and crystal champagne flutes. The former Meredith Grey only used the microwave and drank tequila straight out of the bottle. But she wasn't Meredith Grey anymore, she was Meredith Shepherd, professionally and personally:

_Meredith was squinting at the computer, not because she couldn't see, but because for the first time in a long time, nothing had boggled her mind as much as what was in front of her on the screen. She leaned back on the chair at the dining table, rubbing her hands over her face in frustration, pen in her hand. _

"_Shit…" She whispered as she realised she had drawn a streak across her cheek, pulling the sleeve of her shirt over her hand and rubbing at the pen mark._

_Meredith heard the front door open, and drew a breath. Ever since she and Derek came back from Las Vegas, she had realised exactly what annoyed Derek about having to share their house with a bunch of people. She had learned to value the quiet time, to have the opportunity to talk about mundane everyday things with her husband without having a housemate give their opinion on something that was none of their business. She wanted to fool around with Derek on the couch, and not be almost consumed with the paranoia that someone would walk through the door and either wolf whistle, or melt about how cute it was. She waited until she could put a person to the rhythm of the footsteps, but she couldn't. What she could hear was a box hit the wooden floor in the hallway, and the footsteps become louder as they came nearer._

"_Hey?!" Meredith heard Derek greet in a question, as he wondered exactly which people were in their house this time._

"_In here!" Meredith called out, still rubbing at her cheek._

_Derek's head popped round the corner, smiling extra wide when he realised that they were the only people in the house. They had been married two weeks, and Meredith had only wanted to kill him a handful of times. That was pretty good going by anyone's standards, and all the drama and shock and pointing had finally subsided. Everyone in all the Seattle hospitals knew that Meredith Grey and Derek Shepherd had eloped to Las Vegas, and now they were concentrating on the next tidbit of gossip—which to Meredith and Derek's dismay happened to be Lexie and Mark._

"_Christmas decorations?" Meredith asked, watching Derek place the boxes of lights on the other side of the dining table. "It's the first week of December!"_

"_Humor me…" Derek laughed, coming around to her side of the table to kiss her on the lips. "What's this?" He asked, frowning at the screen in concentration. "Why would you need to contact the medical boards?"_

_Concern flashed on his face as his mind went over all possible scenarios as to why Meredith would need to be on that website. Litigation? Something to do with the trial? Her problem was now his problem, and his hand inadvertently tightened where it lay across her shoulder._

"_Umm…" Meredith started shakily, playing nervously with the edge of her sleeve with her fingertips. But what she was about to tell him wasn't anything bad, anything to be embarrassed about. She was proud of it, and from somewhere, she found the strength to be strong and confident about it. "I'm changing my name to 'Meredith Shepherd.'"_

"_Shepherd?" Derek squeaked in surprise, his eyebrows shooting up to somewhere into the middle of his forehead. He cleared his throat, willing his voice to return to normal, a few octaves lower than his voice a second ago. "You don't want to keep 'Grey?' It's a good last name to have. I figured you wouldn't want to change it."_

_Derek's reaction and reasoning was understandable. Meredith had been so unsure of being in a working and lasting relationship with Derek, it would have been a reasonable assumption that she would keep her own last name. Your name was your identity, you carried it everywhere you go, certain names opened doors, others closed them. Many people, Cristina included would have loved to have that last name, one that implied greatness. But to Meredith, it meant something else. It meant that she was bound to a father that didn't really fight for her, to a mother who didn't really want her, to a time she didn't really want to remember._

"_Grey is… 'Meredith Grey' is…" Meredith faltered. "Is the messed up kid with pink hair whose mother thought she'd never amount to anything. Meredith Grey is the girl who did illegal things under the name of 'Death' with an equally crazy chick nick-named 'Die.' Meredith Grey got blown up by a bomb, drowned, watched her mother slit her wrists when she was five years old. I think I've kinda had enough of being 'Meredith Grey.'"_

"_I love Meredith Grey." Derek whispered in her ear, his warm breath tickling her skin as he spoke. "My Meredith Grey's eyes still light up going into surgery, she has an understated compassion with everyone—it made me fall in love with her. She can't cook, she's messy,she snores…loudly. Don't change your name because you feel you have to, don't change it because of me. You should really want to. Don't send the paperwork, think about it for a while."_

_Meredith's eyes were fixed on his, but heard the 'click' of the laptop lid shut, and the papers being shuffled away from the edge of the table, as Derek flashed her a supportive smile. There was something in the way that he was looking at her which told her he was being honest and genuine—whether she changed her name or not, he really thought she'd be the same 'Meredith' to him—that he didn't really want her to change, that he loved her the way she was, he loved because of her quirks, not despite them._

_With that moment of pushing his ego aside for her, telling her what he thought he ought to and not what was expected, Meredith loved him more than ever. From that gesture, a hope grew within her that maybe she wouldn't turn into her mother, that she could hold down a relationship, and a healthy marriage with a man. Although her mother provided everything for Meredith materialistically, she never gave her the love or had a hope in her that Meredith needed so badly- something that Derek had given her like no other. Even if he had hurt her in the past, even if she hadn't been enough for him before, they had still gotten to this point where they were supporting each other, and maybe if they hadn't gone through all the turmoil before, then they wouldn't have been in this position to understand each other so well._

"_I don't need to think about it. I'm going to be Dr. Mrs. Shepherd." She replied, smiling back at him. She remembered that time she had freaked out to Cristina after she asked Derek to move in, about sharing her life with him. But now building a house with him didn't scare her, nor did the thought of chatty children, although she was still coming round to having five of them._

"_Besides…" she whispered, shooting him a sly little smile as she giggled a little. "If I don't change my name, how else will I claim ownership of the 'Shepherd Method'?…"_

Meredith's eyes glanced to her bare wrist on her left arm, wishing she was wearing a watch right now. She had no way of knowing the time, and all she wanted to do was get away for a few minutes, away from being 'Derek's new wife.' Although it wasn't an urge to run away anymore, there was still perhaps a slight niggle in her, a remnant of her mother's voice in her head telling her that this was unnecessary, saying that she almost hadn't done anything to earn this party. She had gotten married to Derek, and that was enough for her. It truly was. But then she saw Derek talking to a cousin animatedly, and got a glimpse of a different side of her husband, the guy who was everyone's favourite uncle, who always went to family parties. And for the last two years, he hadnt gone back to New York once. Meredith could speculate it was because of Addison, then the divorce, then because of her and their drama, but she didn't really know the reason. All she could do was get over her fear of families, and encourage Derek to get out to the east coast and visit his family—because, after all, isn't that what marriage was about?

Looking at people around the room, she noticed that no one was looking at her, everyone's attention was drawn somewhere else. Cristina and Owen were dancing, albeit badly, and her friends were joining them, making up geeky actions to the song, with Alex joining in reluctantly. She was thankful that Derek's family were so large they seemed to be keeping themselves entertained, with some of the younger ones on the dancefloor and the older ones gossiping amongst themselves. Every single one of those people were there for her and Derek- to celebrate their marriage. They had well-wishers, supporters. People weren't just feigning interest to make them the latest lunchtime talking point, they cared. And Meredith wasn't used to people really caring about her all that much, and that love and support suddenly made her uncomfortable, and it stifled her. Without thinking, Meredith was walking backwards slowly away from the crowd, and turned her back just as she reached the door to the tent.

She stepped outside, breathing in deeply, the cold december air hitting her lungs and biting the skin on her bare arms, causing her exposed arms and shoulders to break out into goosebumps as she stood there and shivered. The music was no longer deafening to her anymore, the people no longer intimidating. It was just a moment of peace, a time where she could regroup, gather her thoughts, and be truly happy again instead of doubting why the guests were even here in the first place. For most of the evening, she had been as happy as she could ever remember feeling—one of those rare moments that wasn't clouded with an excess of alcohol, or that need to defy authority, that hunger to prove that she had the ability to be extraordinary at something.

"Mer? What are you doing out here?" She heard Derek's voice say from behind her.

The question soon became a rhetorical one, as Meredith turned around, a little puff of misty air dissipating into the night air as she breathed out, a guilty look spreading across her face as she watched him walk towards her. She felt like she'd been caught smoking at the side of the high school or something, doing something she wasn't supposed to. Derek's hands found her bare shoulders and that shroud of peacefulness and comforting familiarity covered her with a warmth.

Derek's hands slipped down her arms to rest at her waist while they stood there in the cold silently. Just being there was enough. His fingers feathered over the smooth material of the dress as he stepped even closer, his chest flush against her back as he hugged her tighter, resting his chin on her shoulder. They both looked out to the view of Seattle below them, Seattle on new year's eve, with one lone ferryboat in the distance, crossing the sound. One day soon, they'd be falling asleep to that view, waking up to that view, building a life right next to it. Especially since they had gotten married, Derek really felt like he knew what the phrase 'it's the next day of the rest of your life' really meant.

By all probabilities, they shouldn't have made it this far as a couple. She should never have given into his flirting, she should never have forgiven him for hiding his wife from her- it had seemed like 'someone up there' had created so many roadblocks for them. Instead of thinking that life shouldn't have been that hard, they had faced everything, and it seemed just recently they were living out their reward. Derek had done this before, he had had the newly-wedded experience where colours seem brighter, smells are stronger, and you feel like no one else in the entire world could love someone as strongly as you loved your new spouse. But he knew what happened afterwards, when life took you over, where your ambitions as a couple were lost in your personal ones, how you fell into a comfortability that you craved, only for it to turn into indifference, taking your wife for granted. But he had gone through more hardships and relationship-testing events with Meredith in that one and a half years than he had ever gone through with Addison, and he knew that it took a special connection between two people to withstand the stress he had experienced with Meredith. As he held Meredith close on new year's eve, Derek couldn't deny that he _did_ worry about falling into the same mistakes with Meredith, but he hoped against hope that they would defy the doubt and have their happily ever after in dysfunction.

He instinctively turned his face into her neck as she leaned into his touch some more. He kept hold of her tightly as he peppered her neck with gentle kisses. She was wearing the same dress she was wearing when they got married in Vegas a little more than a month before. She had argued that the dress hadn't gotten that much of a wearing, and not many people had seen her in it anyway. Even though they were back in Seattle, he was transported back to that whirlwind wedding weekend, where everything was done on a whim. And Derek had never been so glad for a snap decision in his life.

There was something about this holiday week of Christmas and new year that made people contemplative, look back on the year and reflect. Here they were, celebrating their _wedding_, and this time last year, they had spent the holidays apart, miserable and pining for each other while they wanted what they couldn't have.

"Derek? Never mind…" Meredith said softly, shrugging her shoulders slightly, as if she was trying to shake the thought out of her head.

"Mer? Go on. You can tell me anything, ask me anything you want to." Derek coaxed gently, his fingers gripping her a little tighter.

'_Don't ruin this moment Meredith. You always ruin moments like this. Self-destructive to a pathological degree. You just can't enjoy anything, be happy for too long. Don't say it, don't say it, don't say it….'_

"It's just…you know, we're _here_…married, on your land which is currently a building site for our house and, this time last year we weren't even together, and then the year before that you were with Addison and…well, the night of the bomb, what made you decide at that moment that your marriage couldn't last any more?"

The breath that Derek was subconsciously holding in whooshed out of his lungs almost uncontrollably. He knew Meredith wasn't worried that their marriage would suffer the same fate, he knew he had more faith in them than that, and he knew she was secure with herself finally—or as much as she could be, given her mother was Ellis Grey. But answering that question would either prompt a million other questions, which would be impossible considering he couldn't even adequately articulate a decent response to this one.

"God…how do I explain this?" Derek sighed, wracking his brain. "I had a decision to make, and sometimes when you make a choice you're not sure of, after you make it you know it's the right one, and sometimes you know it's a wrong one, and rarely, you're still ambivalent about it even after you make it. What's the point in being married if you don't do your best to try and forgive? To move on? You make that commitment and promise each other to be with each other, hopefully for the rest of your life. And then, when the other one breaks that promise, does that mean you don't have to hold yourself to the promise you made? I still—I wonder. And then there was you. There was you…" Derek trailed off.

There was Meredith. She was there all the time, even when he wasn't, even when he was doubtful, she was there. Maybe she was waiting for him, maybe after him nothing else felt the same, maybe she was to busy to look for Derek's replacement. She had always loved him- she had been patient, she had been kind, she forgave him. There was Meredith. She was there then, she was here now. Through all the rough times, she had the hope that maybe they could have their day, that all the complications would be figured out, that they could exist as a couple without all the vilification. And this was their reward. Now they finally were.

Derek cleared his throat. "There was you. And in some kind of screwed up way, it wasn't as if I lost you, because I saw you everyday, and all it took were those few minutes in the same room, or a look from across the hallway for me to fool myself and believe everything was ok between us. And then, we had small conversations, and it ballooned. I took it for granted that I would see you everyday, that we would talk once in a while, and I had become ok with it…and then the code black happened. Afterward, I went looking for you. For a few minutes, I didn't know if you were alive or dead. What hit me was the fact that I might not be seeing you around, that I may never get to speak to you again, and suddenly, it wasn't enough…"

'_If love were enough,she'd still be here with you.'_

"…it forced me to confront that maybe love could be enough. All that time, love could have been enough. The thought of death…it made me a little fearless, forced me to make a decision I had been dodging in my mind for a long time. I had to choose you."

"Derek…" Meredith whispered as tears sprung in her eyes. Right there, on the last day of the year, she really felt that she had everything she needed, she had more than the hope and the faith that this could work, she had the love too.

Ellis Grey was long gone, and her expectations no longer smothered her and intimidated her. Without Derek trusting and supporting her, persevering with the trial even though it seemed like it wouldn't ever work, Meredith's idea would mean nothing. At least there was something she could do better than her mother, and it was turning out to be one of the best things she did. Derek was on her side. And that love that he provided gave her the confidence to be more herself than she even knew she could be, and sometimes she felt that she wasn't quite that to Derek—until now.

If Derek had to choose Meredith, maybe Meredith could choose him too. Blinking the tears out and wiping her cheeks hurriedly, she sniffed and smiled up at him. "Maybe, after the new year's lethargy is over with- we could perhaps move out- find an apartment to tide us over until our house is finished. There are some nice apartments downtown, look at Cristina's. It's close to the hospital, maybe we could get one looking out onto the ferryboats. It could be my wedding present to you."

It was as if since they got back from Vegas, since they shared their first Christmas together with her roommates, Derek had become closer family than her friends. They had become the family you eventually grew out of but still loved, and needed to move away from in order to grow. Meredith had to find herself within her marriage without Izzie watching and commenting on her every move. She wanted to have the opportunity to wake up and eat breakfast without having to listen to someone else's drama. She didn't want to share her precious little spare time she had with Derek with another two other people.

This was what Derek loved about Meredith. Their relationship was crazy, unpredictable, it was like a soap opera with all the ridiculous roadblocks they had faced. Meredith had been through the mill and had come out stronger. He had never really thought they'd move out of her house until their McMansion was ready, and yet she suggested that they rent an apartment. She was finally ready, and she finally chose, not by force, but by choice. He looked into her eyes, knowing every fleck of gold on those green eyes even though it was too dark to see them outside. He was there for her crappy days, and she was there for his.

"Mmm…Meredith…" Derek's voice dropped as he kissed her. Both of them stumbled a few feet until Meredith's back hit the wall of the canvas marquee.

Meredith shivered, though it wasn't because of the cold, but because Derek's lips had moved down the column of her neck and onto her chest. Derek gently pushed the straps of Meredith's dress off of her shoulders. He was rendering her senseless, and she tried to lean further into the wall for support, the heels of her shoes sinking further into the soft damp grass as she tried to keep her balance. The trailer wasn't too far away. Maybe they could sneak off there, no lights on so they wouldn't get caught. Meredith opened her mouth to suggest it, but no words came out, and even if they had, Derek was now kissing her so forcefully that she couldn't do it anyway. It wasn't quite an indecent display, but Meredith wasn't sure that Derek wasn't leaving marks.

It must have been somewhere around about twelve, and Meredith wasn't sure how long both of them had been gone for, but she was surprised a search party hadn't been sent out by now. "Derek…" She said reluctantly, "don't you think we should be getting back inside now?"

"It's our party and we'll leave if we want to." He murmured against her lips, smiling.

'_Wasn't the lyric 'It's my party and I'll cry if I want to?''_ Meredith sighed in contentment, her freezing fingertips winding themselves in Derek's hair, teasing the dark brown locks. It suddenly didn't feel very cold out there on that winter night, but extremely hot. Her nerve endings were on fire, shocks zapping up and down her spine as she involuntarily arched her back, Derek's palms flat against her lower back.

Both of them pulled apart suddenly, hearing Cristina's voice call them. "Hey! Lovebirds! It's nearly midnight, get back inside before they start out a search party!"

Derek looked at Meredith, still coming back down to earth from their make out session. He licked his lips, tasting all he could of Meredith on his skin, before smiling cheekily, his fingers lightly pushing the strap to her dress back to where it should have been, running a quick hand through her hair, trying his best to flatten it back down before pecking her again quickly on the lips. The gesture was sweet and full of love, ending their private moment before being thrust back into the group of noisy well-wishers. Meredith wouldn't have minded if they had brought in the new year by making out against the wall of the canvas marquee they had hired to hold their wedding reception, but it seemed there were expectations.

Expectations that for once, didn't intimidate her, or scare her away, or ones that seemed unfair. Meredith was happy to compromise, to share her first new year with Derek with his and her family. Because now with Derek she was wanted, she belonged, and was loved. It made a change from everything she was used to, what she grew up with, where she was a disappointment, where she was an unwanted burden.

_If only Ellis Grey could see her now._

Now she was Meredith Shepherd, she was making a new life for herself, out from under her mother's shadow. She was doing something her mother had never achieved- she was learning to be happy professionally and personally, and unwilling to compromise both. Because after all, compromises were only called that when you thought you were losing out on something, right? And from Meredith's point of view, she was only gaining everything. She was gaining a whole other side of family, a husband, a job that she was passionate about. Meredith Shepherd was a passionate force of nature. She wasn't losing part of herself, but she was reaping so much more.

They slipped into the crowd much the same way they left- without being noticed. If Derek didn't know any better, it was almost as if everyone had purposely overlooked and ignored their absence, and his eyes met his mothers, who almost imperceptibly winked at him and smiled. He heard Meredith beside him trying lamely (and failing) to make up an excuse to Cristina who was complaining beside her about saving her ass, and it seemed that the more things change, the more things stay the same, and for that, he was grateful.

"You know, it just doesn't feel the same not waiting for the ball to drop…" He heard one of his sisters say to Alex and Izzie, who were waiting for the countdown to midnight with the rest of them on the middle of the dancefloor.

"Don't say it, Alex…" Izzie warned nudging him threateningly.

"Aw, it was too easy anyway…" Alex complained.

This was everything Derek could want. That sentiment that he used to explain why he ended his marriage for Meredith rang true now as well- sometimes you didn't know what you had until it had gone. He missed his family, missed their banter, their suffocating and overbearing love. He missed his sisters' discussing medicine one minute and luxury people carriers the next, he had almost forgotten his mother's ability to organise so many kids and grandchildren. He had his wife, his friends and his family all in the same place, and for the first time in a long time, he didn't have that subliminal sense that something was missing- because it was all right there in front of him. His past, present and future.

Champagne was passed around, and the countdown started. Derek grabbed Meredith by the waist, catching her as she lost her balance a little. They stood face to face, their free hands clutching each other around their shoulders as the cacophonic sound of everyone counting down from ten surrounded them. They stood glued together, their foreheads touching, noses nudging as they looked into each other's eyes, ready to jump into the next year together and hopefully many years after that.

"_THREE, TWO, ONE…HAPPY NEW YEAR!" _

The cheer broke out around Derek and Meredith as they kissed each other- even though it was more decent than the one they shared a few minutes before. A kiss at midnight- it seemed like the perfect way to start their first year of married life together; they were celebrating the year just past, and hoping that the next year would be even better than the last one.

This was the land where Meredith fell in love with Derek, when he brought her here that first time, telling her to take it all on faith.

This was the land where she ran to after their first successful trial patient, hoping that he was really willing to wait if she was really willing to try and have a future with him, without being pushed.

This was the land where they were going to build a life, have children and grow old together. This was where they were going to practice their love everyday for the rest of their lives.

"Happy new year, Meredith." Derek mumbled against Meredith's lips, still holding her as close as he could, her body flush against his as everybody around them celebrated.

Meredith looked up into his eyes, seeing the complete contentment reflected in them. No one could touch them in this moment, no one could burst that bubble. Not dead mommies, not drunken fathers, not even hidden wives. It was just themselves, celebrating themselves and what lay ahead, because they couldn't control what would happen in the future, but they could go through it together, and that's what counted.

She smiled a true smile back at him, resting her head on his shoulder, closing her eyes, wishing this moment would never end, that it would be locked into her memory forever.

"Happy new year, Derek." Meredith sighed contentedly.

_Meanwhile these three remain: faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is love._

And this time, Meredith really believed it.

***********************************************************************************

_**I don't get many things right the first time  
In fact, I am told that a lot  
Now I know all the wrong turns  
And stumbles and falls brought me here**_

And where was I before the day  
That I first saw your lovely face?  
Now I see it every day  
And I know

That I am, I am  
I am the luckiest

What if I'd been born fifty years before you  
In a house on a street  
Where you lived?  
Maybe I'd be outside  
As you passed on your bike  
Would I know?

And in a white sea of eyes  
I see one pair that I recognise  
And I know

That I am, I am  
I am the luckiest

I love you more than I have  
Ever found a way to say to you

Next door there's an old man  
Who lived to his nineties  
And one day passed away  
In his sleep.  
And his wife, she stayed  
For a couple of days  
And passed away

I'm sorry, I know that's a  
Strange way to tell you  
That I know we belong  
That I know

That I am, I am  
I am the luckiest

**Ben Folds- the luckiest.**


End file.
